As I've talked about on Wedding Wednesday's it is easy to let your budget get out of control when you are planning your wedding. So in order to save some major money on the wedding I decided to make all of the bouquets and boutonniere's for the wedding. This has saved us a HUGE chunk of change to spend in other areas of the wedding now. So I'm going to share with you my easy way to make your own wedding bouquets.
The first thing I did was go to a wonderful place called Basket Market in Oklahoma City. Now what is this wonderful place you ask, well it's like a wholesale hobby lobby. That's right, its wholesale hobby lobby, they sell hobby lobby things in bulk. So it is PERFECT for making a ton of different things for your wedding. I also watched their monthly deals to find out when the bulk box flowers were on sale and that's when I bought our flowers.
The box flowers look like the above flowers. They are each single stem flowers that come in boxes of 6-12 stems. They have almost every kind of flower in every color, so it made things very simple when I was trying to decide on what kind and type of flowers I wanted. And in case you were wondering yes I was that extremely annoying person who would pull out a few stems of each box and bunch them together to try and find the right flowers for my bouquets.
Each flower stem had 3 or 4 leaves attached so I made sure to strip the stems bare. This made it a thousand times easier when I was bunching them together. I also trimmed the stems all as close to the same length before I started bunching them together. If you have wire cutters that will make this process a lot easier. I tried to make sure my bouquet base was long enough to comfortably hold with both of my hands, this will be up to the preference of the bouquet holder.
After I have done this will all of my flowers for the bouquet I then spent approximately 20-60 minutes trying to decide exactly how I wanted the bouquet arranged. I just did this with my hands, there are a million tips to use rubber bands, or floral tape, I used my hands. If you try those other options like I did originally you end up getting annoyed because it doesn't stay how you want it just right.
Now the best part about these stems is that they have metal wires in them you can bend to make your bouquet lay right. This helps with the flowers position and gives you the ability to have your OCD make the flowers perfect.
My next step was putting all of the stems together. Why yes, I did use duck tape. This was possibly the best idea I had come up with so far. I have zero fear that my flowers will fall apart or get damaged with my duck tape method. I know they will be secure and exactly how I want with the duck tape around the stems.
I did add so leaves from the stems around the bottom of my bouquet just to add some more depth and interest. I did the duck tape around all of the bare stems first and then I did small pieces of tape on each leaf piece. This gave me the ability to pull them off and rearrange them until they were how I wanted. Then I did a couple (5 times) of duck tape around the top to make sure they were all secure.
After the duck tape I wanted to cover my stems. So I got some ribbon that I had picked out and used Glue Dots to attach them to the base of the bouquet. I put several (as many as possible) glue dots on the actual base of the bouquet as well as several on the ribbon and made sure to overlap the ribbon a little over each strand. This ensured that no duck tape was seen and it made almost every single row of ribbon attached with glue dots. I used several dots at the top and double looped around the top and did the same at the bottom of the bouquet.
As you can see at the bottom of the bouquet the ribbon is just attached with invisible glue dots. I also made sure to burn the end of my ribbon so that it wouldn't fray. I covered all the way to the very edge of the stems because they were hideous after being trimmed.
And this is the final product of my wedding bouquet. I really love peonies and blue and yellow are our colors. The bridesmaids will be wearing blue dresses so I wanted to incorporate the blue and yellow somehow in my bouquet. I really like the way the peonies and garden roses look together and it seemed like the perfect bouquet to carry down the isle.
I followed the exact same steps for the bridesmaid bouquets. They were actually a lot easier because they were so much smaller. This made it much easier to keep a good hold on the flowers.
My wonderful flower storage system until the wedding, I found a box and poked holes big enough for the base of the flowers to fit through. This will keep the flowers from being smashed and loosing their shape before the big day. It also makes things really easy when you are transporting things.
There is my simply tutorial on how to make your own wedding flowers. What do you think of my bouquet strategy? Did you make your own bouquet or have a florist make one for you?
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