DIY Boutonnieres
O nce I finished up with the bouquets, I was feeling pretty confident in tackling the boutonnieres. First, I snapped some “potential option” pictures for Dave to take a look at, to see if he wanted any greenery (and if he did, how he wanted it arranged). I had a variety of ideas utilizing the smaller leafs from the hydrangea stems that I used in the bouquets. After showing all of these ideas to Dave…. he ended up going with no greenery at all. Fine with me, made my life a little easier in putting these together! So the plan was to have a single, mini gerber daisy in ivory for the groomsmen, and a single, mini gerber daisy in fuchsia for the groom. I started out by bending the stem of the boutonniere right behind the flower, so that it...
DIY Bouquets, Part 3 (Final)
I last left off trying to decide whether I liked the bouquets with or without leafs more. I knew I had an appointment with my bridesmaids to select their dress soon, so I figured that would be a great time to solicit their feedback. In the meantime, I went ahead and put together the rest of the bouquets (theirs and mine) without leafs, for the time being. I didn’t use all of the flowers in my bouquet that I expected I would use. The sweatpeas just seemed out of place, and too “tall” for my preferences (I like the round look). In the end, I felt like my bouquet matched the bridesmaid bouquets nicely, without being too unoriginal. I’m very pleased with the outcome of the designs, overall. I then added the leafs to all of the bouquets in...
DIY Bouquets, Part 2
D espite having social obligations last night, I did make a tremendous amount of progress on my bouquets afterwards! I went by Michaels Arts & Crafts (for the third time this week) and got a mini hot glue gun (in pink, of course) and some mini glue sticks. Even though a friend offered to let me use his, everyone kept telling me that once I “go glue gun”, I’ll never “go back”. So I thought it might be worth investing a whole $4.00 in my own. Having never hot glued anything in my life, I did what the typical 20-something-er does now adays, and found a video on YouTube explaining how to use it. It turns out, they are less technical than I expected – you pull the trigger and then press two things together. I watched a 5 minute...
DIY Bouquets, Part 1
L ast night I began the process of making our bouquets. In my job, I work on a lot of items conceptually, or design a lot of items that I often don’t get to see in print. So it has been very exciting to think about making these myself. I started by finding a nice large workspace, which turned out to be our dining room table. Nothing I’m doing should be too “messy”, so Dave didn’t mind me taking up the room. The first plan of action was to strip the leaves off of the flower stems. I had originally assumed I would use a utility knife for this. Dave had a better idea, though, and had me try a pair of his diagonal cutters, which worked perfectly! They let me snip off the leaves, and then shave down the “nub” from where the...
Planning the Bouquets and Boutonnieres
F irst of all, it appears that I will never learn how to spell “boutonniere” without having to Google it. I am copy/pasting it literally every time the word comes up in this post. We began discussing the flowers for our wedding while we were working on the landscaping over last fall. We wanted to make sure that if we had a strong preference for a specific flower, or colors, that we were able to incorporate it into our landscaping, to really tie it altogether. The only strong preference either of us had was that I love gerber(a) daisies, so we started there. I started doing Google image searches for gerber daisy bouquets, and found two typical overall styles. The first is the all gerber bouquet, such as the one below (photo from The $100 Bouquet...
(Updated) A Few Ceremony Touches
I n browsing around looking for ideas for my bouquet, bridesmaids bouquets, Dave’s boutonniere and the groomsmen’s boutonnieres, I’ve come across a lot of inspirational photos. But nothing really jumped out at me as being simple, but elegant enough to match the aesthetic I was going for. That was, of course, until I came across this photo: I fell head over heels in love, and knew I wanted to do something similar for my chairs. I’m pretty certain that I will be using hydrangeas in my bouquets, so doing this on the ceremony chairs will be a great way to tie the two together. I’ve been trying to avoid using real flowers, and for this use it’s no different. I found these ivory and blue silk Hydrangeas and these cream Gypsophilia...