Or, as I have been so fond of calling them, DIY buckets.
I sat down with a friend this past weekend and constructed my bouquets. While I did print out instructions, we never actually read them. Instead, we just laid out all of the materials at our disposal (which included some $150+ worth of silk flowers, florist’s wire, and florist’s tape) and experimented wildly with differing combinations of color, size, and greenery. I am actually amazed at how wonderfully our efforts turned out, as neither of us had ever created a bouquet. Observe:
Sorry about the pisspoor image quality — my camera is about a thousand years old and photography has never been my strong suit. The first one is the bridal bouquet and is actually quite a bit bigger (and heavier!) than the bottom one, of which there are two. At the last second, I put together a matching tosser in case I unexpectedly find myself facing a herd of rabid female relatives asking me when I’ll be throwing the bouquet. The Beard and I discussed tossing the actual bridal bouquet and then realized that we don’t need to start our lives together facing endless rounds of personal injury litigation.
I will say that the whole bouquet-making process is rather intuitive, as you end up having to use wire to keep your early efforts from falling apart while you look for more blooms and there is no better way to wrap up a mess of unruly stems than with tape that only sticks to itself. The ribbon-wrapping, which I did myself, was somewhat harder as I was using pins to secure the ribbon.
If you plan to follow in my footsteps, I suggest looking at lots of pictures of wedding flowers online and in books like To Have & To Hold: Magical Wedding Bouquets or Creative Wedding Florals You Can Make.
Now, if I can just keep the cats from gnawing on the aforementioned bouquets, everything will be peachy.
Love the bouquets NtB! They turned out gorgeous!!
Looks great, NtB! I’m making my own bouquets as well, except I’m using real flowers. (With help from my brideslaves.) I’ve been practicing with roses from BJ’s–which are really nice, BTW, they last for a very long time. However, I’m getting my wedding roses from freshroses.com. I hope it all turns out!
I love that you call them brideslaves too. hehehe. 🙂
So pretty!
Making bouquets is really surprisingly easy…especially when you either use silk flowers that you can rearrange easily if you don’t like the results or if you do a simple sheaf bouquet. That’s what I and my bridesmaids had for my wedding.
We took a random assortment of long-stemmed flowers, piled them up in a nice arrangement, and tied them with ribbons. We plunked the results in a bucket of water until we needed them for photos and the big event. Dead simple, and they looked lovely. We didn’t even have to mess with plastic holders, wire, or sticky tape!
If you want fairly simple bouquet styles, I highly recommend choosing them as a DIY project. You can save a bundle, and there’s nothing like the feeling of making something yourself.
Good luck keeping the cats at bay, NtB! Cats are only civilized insofar as they see direct benefit to themselves…and that doesn’t always match our vision of good behavior! LOL! (loves own cat…but recognizes what a very rude little thing he is)