Weddingbee Blog

I agonized for months about what we should do for our guestbook. I really wanted to do Martha Stewart’s Conversation-Starter Guest Books, but making those was going to cost too much money. I also really liked the idea of having a Wedding Tree for guests to “leaf their thumbprint,” but I knew I would have no place to hang something like that in our home. I never planned to spend a lot of money for a guestbook and since I didn’t really have any money to spend anyway, I needed something free more than anything.

Finally, it came to me! I decided to go with a message board! One evening after work, I ran around the house like a mad woman gathering supplies to see if I could pull this off! I’d seen plenty of tutorials online and figured it couldn’t be that hard!

I cut, stapled, cut, and stapled…

Brides, please get a staple gun that works and don’t just use one you found in the basement!!! Mine was a real pain in the butt! I’m sure whether it was the actual staple gun or the piece of wood I used, which was thick, but the staples did not go in all the way in and we had to basically staple, then hammer.

Improvise is the name of game, folks!

Speaking of improvising, I wasn’t sure we had enough fabric from our frames left to cover the message board so I went searching through the house for something else. You won’t believe what I found: an extra large pillowcase in the perfect shade of green!! We cut it open and using spray adhesive, wrapped one whole side around the wood.

Ta da!!

Things were looking good so far and I started to get really excited! After all, I had finally settled on a guestbook, we were going to have a DIY message board, and it was FREE! Then it came time to add the ribbon and that’s when my mom and I hit a brick wall.

Figuring out how to lay the ribbon across the board was way too complex for us! We had to call my brother in for help. He measured the board (Duh! Why didn’t we think of that?) and marked the areas where we needed to cross the ribbon. Thanks, Brother Brooch!

Then we went back to stapling and hammering!

I’m not sure we got the ribbon 100 percent right, but it’ll work. I still need to buy pins or something (ideas anyone?) to add to it, but after covering the back with the other part of the pillow case, I must admit, I am pretty stoked with the final product! I still can’t believe we made this out of a piece of wood from the garage and a pillowcase!

The next step is to create little note cards for our guests to leave us a message. I really like the idea of having little phrases and prompts on them, like this:

Does anyone know the best way to make something like this?

Source

What kind of guest book are you having?