Category — Pictures

After playing around with a few bunches of flowers this weekend, I highly recommend the DIY route to any bride looking to save a lot of money. And here are all the reasons why. 1. )Flowers are naturally beautiful, which means you have to work extra hard to make them look bad. 2.) Simple is timeless.  3.) It is way easier than everyone makes it out to be 4.) It wasn’t that time consuming.

Here’s the process and then my own list of tips to help make your experience a bit smoother.

Materials

•  flowers from the grocery store (baby’s breath. 2 packs = $8 + spray roses. 2 packs = $8)
• floral stem tape  (don’t remember the price but it was pretty inexpensive and can be purchased at any craft store)
• floral wire 
• floral pins
• satin ribbon (about a yard)

1. The Process
2.  Begin by stripping the flowers of all there leaves. You can do this by hand.
3. Then, gather the flowers a few branches at a time to get them in a round, half sphere shape. I found I had to break off some of the baby’s breath at this point to get a smoother shape.  As you gather the flowers, use the wire to hold the stems in place.
4. Once you have our bouquet at your desired thickness, secure everything with a bit of wire. Then, begin taping. I started wrapping the tape  from the top and worked my way around until I got about 6-7 inches down. I wrapped the stems a few times with the tape to help smooth the stems out. I found the trick with the tape was to pull it tighter than what I found to be natural.
5. After taping the flowers, I started wrapping the ribbon around the flowers. I used the ribbon I will use at the wedding for this part, so I could see how it would look. I began wrapping from the top (about an 1 inch  or so from the top of the flowers and made my way down. My ribbon was 1.5 inches wide and it took about a yard for me to wrap all the way down and then back up. I folded the edge of the ribbon under and then pinned it down to secure it. After I secured the ribbon, I cut the excess stems. And voila! I was done. Yes, it was just as easy as that. Here are some photos. Not bad for the first try, huh?

Tips

• Definitely practice if you decide to do your own flowers. It will ease your mind and build your confidence.
• Keep it simple! I didn’t mix a lot of flowers and I think that helped a lot. It was less intimidating.
• Don’t be stingy with the tape. I found that using more tape helped smooth out the stems. 

Last week I posted on a picture of the reserved seating signs. Here’s how I made them. 

Materials:

• black cardstock (80 lbs)
• ivory cardstock (110 lbs)
• Illustrator (or some other program to lay out your design)
• A corner punch
• A ruler
• A paper cutter
• adhesive
• 7/8 inch satin ribbon

I laid a fairly simple design out in illustrator. I got four signs on a sheet of 8.5 x 11 piece of paper. After printing the reserved seating signs, I cut them down to 3.5 inches by 4.5 inches. I used black square scrapbooking paper for the background paper. I cut that to 4.5 inches by 5.5 inches. 

Once all the paper was cut, I used a corner punch to round the corners of both the black and cream paper. Once all the corners were rounded, I laid the ribbon in the center of the black paper. Once centered, I glued it down. Then, I ran my fancy adhesive roller tool on the cream reserved sign, centered it, and glued it down. 

The results:

Flowers are expensive, especially wedding flowers, and I am working on a tight wedding budget. That means I don’t have thousands of dollars to spend on flowers. In fact, I don’t even have hundreds and hundreds of dollars to spend. So, very early on in the wedding planning process I knew I was going to buy bulk flowers and put them together myself. Yesterday I decided to practice and make a few bouquets.

I was going back and forth between baby’s breath and spray roses. Both are perfect for an outdoor wedding. Since I couldn’t decide, I made a bouquet of each. They are both so pretty! Which one do you like?

More on the process soon!

Outer Envelope.

Embossed inner envelope. Nice G, huh?

Invitation in the inner envelope.

The full invitation.

Invite without the band.

Back of the invitation.

Here is a sneak peek at our invite.