Wedding Wednesday//Flowers & Bouquet Tutorial Part 1

Oh my Goodness! 17 days. Can you believe it!! Only SEVENTEEN days until our wedding. I am having a miniature heart attack just thinking about it. It feels like it was only a week ago that I was marking off 200 days in my Project Life album the last week of April. I feel like time is melting away! Over the weekend, we checked another big thing off the list.

Last week, at about 7:30 in the morning, there was a pounding on my door. I was a little pissed to be honest. Even more so when I opened the door and saw no one there. I was a little exposed so it took me a minute to get to the door while I put something more appropriate on. I even hollered "just a minute".  Before closing the door to go back in, I saw the FedEx truck drive away. I looked around and noticed a rather large box resting against the wall about a foot from my door.

Thankfully, the name on the box was mine and I knew exactly what was in there. It was our flowers! I spent the rest of the weekend arranging bouquets. Before I get into how I made the bouquets, lets talk about the flowers. After plenty of back and forth, I settled on Dried Flowers 'R Us. Their offerings are overwhelming. I really just needed to sit down and think about what I wanted. We went with strawflowers. I ordered an order of 75 burgundy and 75 mixed. It was perfect!

The flowers arrived in bundles of 25. First, I separated the burgundy bundles into five groups of 15. I have five bridesmaids and those five bundles were the basis of the bouquets. I started with three stems of relatively equal sizing. Strawflower stems are fragile during the drying stages, so they replace them with stiff floral wire. To keep the first three flowers together, I wrapped them with floral tape.

Next, I added three other burgundy stems to the first three but in a manner that the six created the triangle shape shown above. Add more floral tape. On the next go around, I filled in with 4-6 more flowers of different colors as well as the burgundy. Again, secure with more floral tape.

Keep on adding more flowers. I added more flowers in rows and "layers". I filled in to make sure there were not holes or bunches of yellow, orange, or pink in all one area. After an addition of 4-6 more stems, I taped them down. It kept everything together so that my hand did not strain too much and the stems stayed where I wanted them too. As I got further from the center of the bouquet, I made a small bend in the floral wire to achieve the dome look of most bouquets. I kept adding flowers until there were 25 stems to a bouquet. Before the final taping, I adjusted the stems to make sure the shape is how I wanted it.

In one afternoon, I finished all of the bridesmaids' bouquets. It really wasn't too time consuming. Right now, they are sitting in plastic bouquet bags as I still need to figure out how to cover all of taped ends. Whether it be just ribbon or twine or adding a little bit of padding to the handle so there is a little bit more to hold on to. I also got a head start on the boutonnieres as can be seen to the right. Once I figure out how to finish these off, I will update again. Lets hope that inspiration hits me soon because there is only 17 days to go! Argggghhhh!