Wedding Guest Book

For our wedding guest book I went down an untraditional route, in that I ended up with a wedding guest bag.

The idea came from the tea-towels we used to make at school. It might have happened in your school too. Everyone draws a picture of themselves then they get sent away and printed on a tea towel of the whole school.

Photograph by Paul Summerfield

Being an artist I liked the idea of everyone doing a bit of drawing.
I cut out squares of paper and provided plenty of biros. At the venue, I'd provided a large notice board to be set up on my table easel, with lots of drawing pins for people to display their portrait.

Photograph by Paul Summerfield

It was a lot of fun going through the drawings a few days after the wedding. Not everyone did a drawing and I thought about whether to do their portrait myself, but in the end we decided to just draw Andrew's brother and Nan ourselves so that we at least had all of our family represented.

Once I had all the drawings I scanned them in and edited them as some needed to be a bit darker. Then I arranged them on Photoshop with our names and the date of our wedding in the middle.

I went with the tea towel idea for a bit but then decided to make the drawings into something  I would get more use out of; a canvas tote bag.

I found this Etsy shop to print the bag and sent them the final image of all the pictures put together.

I really love this idea as it's something we'll use every time we go shopping, rather than having a traditional guest book which just sits on a shelf.

Wedding Guest Tree

My friend Laura, the one who just got married, wanted a non-traditional guest book for her wedding and had seen the guestbook tree with finger print leaves on the internet. Being her resident arty friend she asked me if I could make one for her.

I googled the idea myself and found I liked the black line, sketchy style better than a painted brown tree. I drew out the tree in pencil first on the canvas Laura had bought, then went over it with a black fine liner. Simples!

I added the couple's names and their wedding date along with a cute little L + C in a heart on the tree.

  

This is how the canvas was displayed at the wedding. We'd taken a trip to Hobbycraft to get the ink pad and found the perfect one. It has five shades of purple on one pad which matched the wedding colours. We also got a couple of Sharpie fine liners for the guests to sign their name on top of their thumb print.

I suggested to Laura that she provided wet wipes so that guests didn't have to walk around with purples thumbs for the rest of the night. She took them out of the packaging and put them in a clear box so they wouldn't detract from the decorations.

This was the tree half way through the night. I didn't get a photo of the finished thing as I was too busy busting my funky moves on the dance floor.