Weddingbee Blog

Are you guys sick of this idea yet? I hope not, because I’m going to touch on it for one more hot minute!

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By now, you’ve seen it a few times… Mrs. Lamb did a hand painted wedding tree, Ms. Poodle designed hers on her computer, and lots of other ladies buzzing around the hive have made beautiful and creative versions themselves!

Well, I too wanted to do this after I saw it over on Ruffled. Now, you may be thinking, ‘Ms. Cheeseburger, you’ve already got a guestbook,’ and my friends, you would be absolutely correct! Not to mention the fact that we invited over 300 people to our wedding, and if even half of that number gives us their prints, we’d need a very, very big tree!

So how will we incorporate this lovely idea but make it work for us?

Then, it hit me. The most important people - immediate family and closest friends - will all be in attendance at the Wedding Rehearsal and Rehearsal Dinner! Since we have such a large bridal party, our rehearsal will actually have about 55 people at it (I know, it’s big!) - the perfect number to print up our tree! Plus, it will be so wonderful to remember our wedding party by something other than pictures.

With that decided, and Burger on board with this awesome idea, I sat down with PowerPoint (come on, what else?), and busted out some Peach Sundress (obv.), and then did a quick search for “bare tree” on istockphoto. What did I find?

Well first, I found the tree that Paul & Cassie, the couple who started at all (I think), used. And while I loved the tree on their poster, I really wanted to change it up a bit. When I found another tree, I knew I had found our tree.

A quick purchase later, I popped it into my PowerPoint and sent it to Brother Cheeseburger who does all of the technical things I cannot do (like change the PowerPoint slide into an 18×24″ pdf!).

Et voila!

I printed this at Kinko’s using their poster printer. It was about $20 because it was black and white only - I believe if it had been color it would have been a little more expensive.

And that was that! It’s all framed and ready to go for Friday night at our Rehearsal Dinner!

But wait! What about the leaves, you say? Well I grabbed these awesome green stamp pads at A.C. Moore to use:

There is one problem, though. The ink is really, really difficult to get off of your finger. Like I couldn’t get it off with surgical scrub. So, as much as I’m a laid back bride when it comes to the bridal party, I really don’t want them to have green thumbs in the pictures!

At my next trip to the craft store, I noticed a bunch of small, different green ink pads in the dollar bin by the register - score! I grabbed 3 and tested them when I got home - they look great and wash off easily. Victory!

Are you jumping on the Tree Guestbook bandwagon? Are you doing anything at your rehearsal dinner specifically for your special peeps?