HOW TO MAKE A FABRIC BOUQUET

This pin was the inspiration for my bouquets.. the bouquets I decided to make at the last minute.. the bouquets I ended up using for our rehearsal.. Read more about the flowers we used for the ceremony here..

So. The pin. I collected most of my wedding inspiration from pinterest.. in fact, I'm still pinning to my wedding board, just because I don't think you ever really stop planning your dream wedding, do you? Anyway. The pin led me to this great tutorial by Josephine Sicad over at Rock N Roll Bride.

I bought the whisks*, I bought the wool, and I had a few clip on fabric flowers (that I had originally thought might make fun boutonnieres) that I used as my foundation for the bouquets.



But those clip on flowers are not exactly cheap, and I didn't want to spend a fortune on the bouquets.. even though they ended up costing more than they should have.. so I decided I was going to make the rest of the flowers out of scraps from my dress and some of the leftover fabric from the backdrop.

I don't really know what I was thinking.



I made it up, pretty much. I looked up some tutorials on how to make fabric flowers, and some suggested templates and how to sew them and.. it was all just too much work.

So, I just took my hot glue gun, and sort of molded and shaped them and put a drop of glue in the folds of the flowers after every turn.. and just let them form themselves. I got into a rhythm after a while, and made a bunch from about 3 different fabrics over the course of three evenings.

Because I made the flowers from scrap fabric, they didn't have clips or safety pins to affix them to the wool or the rings of the whisk, so I hot glued as many as I could to the rings, and then I glued the interior flowers to each other, attaching them to the ones already glued to the wire. A little more planning was required, since you couldn't change your mind, but because I had several shapes and sizes, I was able to fill in without too much difficulty.

I had all of those buttons too, that I considered adding into the mix, but they were never used.



Honestly, I loved them. The only problem was that the peachy/pink flowers didn't match my sister's bridesmaids dress.. so we improvised with the peonies at the last minute and used these at the rehearsal instead. And learned, once again, that nothing goes the way you plan it. Even when you're an awesome planner *ahem.

*a tip about the whisks: flatten/shape one "ring" at a time. I tried to do them all at once, for about 15 minutes. had my then fiance try to assist.. and we couldn't do it. you would think it would be obvious to reshape each individual ring one at a time, starting from the interior and moving to the exterior, but it wasn't obvious to us. xo