My Bouquet

So...I've been teasing you for a week now...it's about time for me to ante up, right? I've teased you with the hard work that MOH and I did the weekend before last. This is the last post of what all we worked on that weekend, since I still can't show you the invitation suite yet.


Without further ado, I present my bouquet! Insert swoon here...isn't it lovely? Need another look? Ok, twist my arm...here you go!What's that you asked? OH! You want to see a close up of some of the flowers...well, ok, I suppose I can do that too!I think that last picture actually needed to be rotated before I posted it, but you get the idea.


So...what do you think? That bouquet is 100% artificial flowers. It has the perfect mix of wedding colors (ivory and greenery) and my own color (eggplant) with enough touches of lavendar thrown in to provide a blending of the two stark colors. I LOVE. IT. Seriously...LOVE it! I couldn't imagine a more perfect bouquet if I tired, and I've looked at about a thousand inspiration pictures so far...maybe even two thousand.


Now, I know what you're all wondering...how did I do that? How did MOH and I make the bouquet right? You want some step-by-step instructions, right? You see, that's where we run into a little snag. I don't really know how we did it. And since I thought that maybe I was just having a bridal moment of memory relapse, I asked MOH. And she didn't really know either. But I do have some before pictures...and some in action pictures...and maybe if you bear with me, you'll get some type of instruction!


Here is what we started with:


Actually, I started with two of those. I ordered ALL of the artificial flowers from afloral.com, and I would HIGHLY recommend them if you're thinking of using some artificial flowers. They have a generous return policy, and just like with the guys' ties, I ordered one flower of all of the ones that I liked and then sent back what I didn't like and re-ordered larger quantities of what I did like. As luck would have it, afloral.com was also running a special as I placed my large order offering FREE shipping on orders over a certain amount. Check them out here - they're GREAT!


Once I had received all the flowers in hand, I just put it all aside until this weekend when MOH would be here to help me. Since we were combining two of the pre-made bouquets from afloral.com, the bouquet was semi-full before we started adding more stems. We gathered the two bouquets together and then I started trimming down the individual stems while MOH worked the bouquets apart, as the stems were tightly packed togheter. Creating space between the blooms allowed us to insert the individual stems that I had fallen for...mainly lavendar roses, ivory peonies and some lilac/cream hydrangeas.


This is what the process looked like:
MOH would work in one stem and then turn it over and fluff. She would pull it apart and insert another one, being careful to hold the base of the stems firm and not let any of the stems loose. Once we got all the stems that we thought we needed in the general vicinity that we wanted, this is what we ended up with:

It was close, but not perfect. You see there around the base? There were too many of those light green hydrangea blooms all around the base. Since these weren't real flowers, the problem was easy to solve. We just pulled the buds off of some of the stems. We thought about trimming the stems down too, but then worried that we might want to add them back later, so we just worked around them and hid them in the remaining blooms.


MOH would work on it for a bit, and then I would take over for a little while. We must have swapped the bouquet back and forth about twenty times, each of finding small adjustments to make in the overall look. We made sure that one side didn't droop further than the other sides, and also that the overall shape was rounded. At times, we had to seperate some of the blooms of the pre-made bouquets to pull them "out" of the bouquet a bit and make them "taller" in the bouquet. We just passed it back and forth. And back and forth. Then, before we knew it...we both couldn't find anything to make it any better.
Starting at the base of the stems closest to the flowers, we took a 1 1/2" black satin ribbon and pinned it along the end. Without cutting the ribbon in length, we wrapped the bouquet...MOH held the bouquet in place and I worked the ribbon around tightly, inserting pins along the way down the stems. We wrapped almost to the bottom of the stems and then I came back up the stems about halfway before we cut the end and pinned it in place.

Since I hadn't thought to buy them yet, we just used regular straight pins for sewing to pin the ribbon in place. I will purchase some pearl-head pins to "polish" the look of the bouquet off, and the reason that I went halfway back up the stems was in case I re-wrapped the whole bouquet when I put the pins in and needed an extra length of ribbon. I also plan on burning/melting the end of the ribbon when I re-wrap it so that no fraying will occur.


About that time in the day, it was almost midnight, and MOH and I had been at it steadily since our cake tasting appointment at 11am that morning. MOH made the great suggestion that maybe we should set the bouquet aside until the morning and take a fresh start at the process. I agreed, and I set it in the vase you see it pictured in.


But when I came back downstairs the next morning, I was in love. Totally and completely in love. My bouquet was perfect, and needed no more adjustments. What I like most about it, is that this task is done and crossed off of my list. No last minute worries about the florist not doing something correctly, and since they're not fresh there won't be any last minute worries about messing up the flowers. And, since it won't die, I can be sure to find a place for it in our home after the wedding...as a memento of our special day.


Didn't MOH do a great job with this task? I think that she deserves a round of applause! Do you agree? What do you think about having an artificial bouquet?