Frugal wedding flowers - Sola flower DIY, part 3 making bouquets

For me, making the bouquets was the hardest part, it was very time consumming. I tried several different "stems." The floral wires and bamboo sticks (suggestions of what to use I'd seen online) were both really rigid, which I found made it hard to put them together and shape the flowers in the way I wanted.

After some trial and error, I chose a main flower to put in the middle of the bouquet (a large one) and put that one on a bamboo stick (the kind used to make shish kabobs) and attach floral wire to all of the other flowers which I then wrapped around the main flower's "stem." If you are planning to do this, start at least a month before your wedding - it took FOREVER to make the bouquets and I only had mine, 3 bridesmaids, 1 flower girl and 1 toss. If you have a big wedding party, you will need help. Unfortunately none of my girls lived nearby and I did not ask any local friends because I wasn't aware that it was going to take up my entire life for over a week.

Ok so more detail on the process.

Main flower
Take the pointed end of the bamboo skewer and poke it a little way in to the base of the flower (not too far because the base is not that thick) pull it out and put hot glue in the hole and then stick the skewer back in and let it dry.

All other flowers
This is the part that takes a long time, because you need a lot of flowers and each one needs to have a wire attached and then dry. Cut lengths of floral wire about 10-12 inches long. Using the same technique as I described for wiring the boutineers in part 2, poke a small hole in the base of the flower and put the floral wire through the hole. You will want one end to come out about 3 inches and the other end longer, about 6-7 inches. Glue the wire in place and let it dry, then twist the short end around the longer end of wire a few times. I would clip off any excess of the short wire because the bouquet will be heavy enough without a bunch of excess wires.

I did this in batches because I only had so much space to allow the glue to dry. I would poke holes in 5-6 flowers, then glue them all and then poke holes in the next batch, twist all the wires from batch one which were dry by then and then glue batch two. I would prep 30ish flowers of different kinds and then assemble the bouquets. Which brings me to….

Assembly

I made my flower girls bouquet first because it was one of the smallest, and it seemed easiest. For the small one, I just added flowers one at a time twisting around the base and putting in some greenery and dried baby’s breath wherever I had spaces between the flowers and it was fine.

Then, feeling confident, I started to make my bridal bouquet. I got about half done and I hated it. I felt a little discouraged by this and I wanted nice bouquets for me and my girls so I waited until the next day and took the bouquet almost entirely apart and started over. This time, instead of adding flowers one at a time I arranged 3-4 and some greenery around the middle and then used floral tape to hold it together so I could add the next few flowers. This made it easier to see how it would look as a batch and I could move the few flowers around until I liked them. You might have to play around with it a little bit until you get a look that you like.

After you get the flowers arranged and taped together, you want to do a good wrapping with floral tape, at least 2 layers to make sure everything is secured well (like with the boutineers). Then I used quilt batting which I had leftover from quilt making, but you can buy a baby quilt size package if you need some. DO NOT get the cheap poly fill, but get the poly/cotton blend, it is less fluffy and sticks together better. Cut a long strip of the batting that is approximately an inch wide.  Wrap the batting around the stem, securing with hot glue as you go along. As the final step, repeat this process with satin ribbon.

While I was super stressed out during the process, and it took an inordinate amount of time, I still think it was worth it in the end. My bouquets look really cute and compared to fresh flowers, I saved about 1,000 dollars plus I had lots of extra flowers for decorations beyond the bouquets which I wouldn't have gotten fresh flowers for. If you are a DIY bride like me, I highly recommend the sola flowers - just be prepared for it to take 10 days to get it done during your evenings/weekend or enlist some help. Also make sure you order a plenty of flowers way in advance, especially if you order from Thailand because the shipping took almost a month for one of my orders and of course, that was the one close to the wedding when I really needed them.