Wishing trees are a lovely alternative to guest books, friends and family write messages of love, luck or sometimes advice for a happy marriage. The tags can be put into an album after the wedding as a keepsake or next to photos of the guests. This easy guide gives step by step instructions to make your own wishing tree and a few ideas to decorate it.
Materials needed:
Branches, container for tree, floral foam for dry flowers, tags, narrow ribbon, tray or basket for tags, frame to hold instructions, glue, crystals, decorations, spray paint, pens, reel of florist wire.
Tips
Look for full branches that have lots of small twigs to hang your decorations on like manzanita branches. They also need to be quite sturdy to hold all your decorations and tags.
If you want to make a large wishing tree for a real focal point, you may need to bind a few branches together. Use the reel of florist wire to tightly secure the branches.
Select a container roughly 1/3 of the height of your branch so it won’t be top heavy, but don’t forget your branch will be pushed to the bottom of the container. You can add extra weight to the base by adding some decorative gravel or stones.
If you want to decorate your own tags, buy plain ones with ribbon to match your wedding colours. Add touches like diamantes, or stamp pictures on them. You could order a hand carved stamp personalised with your names and wedding date, you can find these on etsy.
image: Anista Designs, Etsy
1/ Spray paint your branches gold or silver outside and leave them to dry. Make sure you spray them over a piece of card or a box as spray paint will stain. Leave the branches overnight to dry. If you prefer a natural looking tree leave the branch bare.
2/ Cut the dry floral foam to size and push it into the container, it’s better if the oasis is slightly too big and it is wedged in rather than too small as the tree will wobble about. Hide the oasis with decorative gravel, polished stones or moss.
3/ Drape your crystal garlands on the tree ensure they are spread through the branches all the way round the tree.
4/ Attach any decorations like butterflies or silk flowers by wiring or gluing them onto the branches.
5/ If you have made your own tags and attached accessories to them leave any glue to dry overnight before putting them away.
6/ Print out instructions or a poem for your guests telling them what to do and put it in a pretty frame next to your tree. Make sure you ask them to sign the card too.
7/ Put a couple of nice pens next to your wish tags.
image: Manifest Your Heart's Desire, ebay
A few more ideas ideas:
Fairy lights look very pretty at night, wind some battery powered lights around the branches of your tree for a magical touch.
For a romantic wishing tags print the dictionary definition of love on the cards, and add the day you both met to it.
For vintage theme tags use handcrafted Kath Kidston print tags or tags with lace style cut out edges. Lots of seller on eBay make unusual or vintage tags.
There is more info about wishing trees in this post
