Frugal wedding flowers - Sola flower DIY, part 2 Making boutineers & corsages

Let me say, this was my first time making boutineers and this is was the part I was the most worried about when DIY’ing my flowers for the wedding. I was comfortable doing it because my mom, who had done it before was going to help me but an issue arose close to our wedding and I ended up being on my own for flower making. So while I was concerned about it, I think it was possibly the easiest part, especially the boutineers, the bouquets on the other hand I wasn't worried about but they were a pain the rear!

These are not the beautiful works of art you will find on pinterest but I would say they are as nice as a basic model from a florist. They are simple, in part, because my fiancé did not want a huge flower for himself, so I made his fairly small and then all the ones for the other men slightly smaller than his.

Making the boutinners was really straight forward, I suggest you start with these because they are the easiest.

Supplies needed:

·         Main flower

·         Accent flower (if making a larger bout)

·         Filler flowers (I used dried baby’s breath and dried greenery; I also got some dried blue flowers that matched our colors perfectly)

·         Floral tape*

·         Floral wire

·         Corsage pins

·         Hot glue gun and glue

I went to Michael’s with a list of everything I thought I’d need and I bought a bunch of all of it. I planned to return anything I did not use. I had a hard time finding the dried flowers, almost everything was silk and had to ask someone. The shop lady dissuaded me from using the dried baby’s breath saying it was really fragile but I personally did not find it to be any more fragile than a real flower or my sola flowers.

There are a bunch of tutorials on how to make boutineers, I read a bunch of them. A bunch. But I couldn’t find much on make them from sola flowers, which don’t have stems so I had to figure some of that out on my own, which is in part, why I’m writing this post.

To start, I took all the sola flowers I was planning to use and poked a hole through the base “nub” of the flower. This is the hardest part. The floral wire is too bendy to poke the hole so I was using a toothpick and some tiny screwdriver my fiancé gave me (I think it was to repair glasses). After I poked a hole through the flower base, I ran a length of floral wire through the hole. I used about a ~7in length of wire (seriously get the large spool of wire when you shop, especially if you are also doing bouquets). Hot glue the wire in place on both sides. The flower is so fragile, without the glue, the wire will easily tear though the base and fall out. The glue hardens and holds it all together.

Stabbing the flower base!

After the glue cools, twist the two ends of the wire together and your flower is ready to roll. You’ll need to do this for all of the solar flowers you are going to use.

Wire glued in place!

From here you are ready to assemble the boutineer, like any other boutineer. To do this, I held my main flower and then held up various accents to see how it looked, then floral taped them together. The floral tape is cool, it’s not sticky until you stretch it a little bit and it basically only sticks to itself, it’s weird. It also makes your hands smell a little funky, so enjoy that! If I was doing a larger boutinner or a corsage, I would floral tape the different elements together. I wanted a good tape base anyway so there’d be something to put the pins through when it’s pinned on. 

Best man, groomsman and groom flowers. Each style is a little different.

But basically, that was it. I just wired the flowers and arranged them with a little greenery and when they looked good to me, taped them together. My fiancé did not want a ribbon on his flower, so they are all intentionally naked, except the corsages for our moms and grandmas which I put bows on.

To make those ribbons, I just folded the ribbon a few times and then wrapped floral wire around the center and secured it with glue. I then used the wire to attach it to the res of the corsage and taped it using the floral tape like everything else.

One of the mom corsages

The next step is to make the bouquets, here is my post on bouquet making.

*These are affiliate links. I posted links to examples of what I'm talking about in case you aren't familiar with these items. If you purchase via the link I'll receive a small commission.