Weddingbee Blog

When I first started planning our wedding, I knew one thing for sure: I was going to make/wrap the bouquet myself. Then somewhere along the line, I changed my mind. I received the name of a local florist who can ’work with any budget’, and started to daydream about how nice it would be to have a professional bouquet ready-made (with no effort from me). But after speaking with the florist, I realized that their version of ’any budget’ was different from mine. To the tune of $50 for five flowers (calla or roses).

So that pretty much made up my mind: I am making my own bouquet!

I have never, ever done any kind of flower arranging before. I’m also kind of a black-thumb, and not very delicate sometimes. Because of this, I decided I ought to give it a preliminary try to make sure it was doable (though at this late date, it is probably pretty much my only option).

I did a little research in Weddingbee’s DIY section, taking advice from the posts of Mrs. Quiche and Mrs. Champagne (great video link!). Then I set out to get my supplies.

Items purchased:

• 1 dozen white roses: $9.99 (Super Target)
• 1 roll of floral tape: $1.99 (Michaels)
• 1 package of corsage pins: $1.79 (Michaels)

Supplies I already had:

• Sharp knife (for trimming the flowers)
• Green ribbon (leftover from my 2nd sash). If I’d bought the ribbon, it’d have been $3.99 for 10 yards.

Let me tell you: I really proved my inability to be delicate with floral pursuits on my way home. These roses were stuffed in a Target bag and put in my back seat, where they rode around in 80+ degree heat with me for an hour or so as I ran other errands. Then I almost rear-ended someone on my way home: I had to slam on my brakes, causing the flowers to fly off my car seat and go crashing (blooms-first) on to the floor. And then I got home and (while juggling several grocery bags) somehow managed to slam them in the door of the house. Nice. Yet, look! They were still OK.

My first step was to remove all of the thorns and leaves. It occurred to me that maybe it was a dumb idea to buy roses for the trial: stupid thorns! But really, since I don’t know what kind of flowers I’ll find for the day-of, roses were probably a great choice because now I’m a thorn-removing pro!

Here I am, cutting away the leaves/thorns.

And here they are, nekkid.

There is really no trick to removing leaves and thorns. Just take a clean, sharp knife (floral scissors/clips would be ideal, I suppose) and lop ’em off. I also peeled off any petals that were browning, damaged or hanging off (there were plenty, after the tough journey these flowers had!) and tossed those in the trash.

Next it was time to wrap ’em. Here are my supplies (the pins are for later, but they’re in this pic).

Floral tape is stretchy and tacky. The bouquet will be the tightest if you stretch that tape around the stems quite firmly. If you don’t, it’ll probably stretch itself out and you’ll have yourself a loose bouquet. I started with just a few flowers. I gathered them together and wrapped the tape around them a few times at the point where all of the stems met.

Then I added a few more flowers, kept wrapping, added a few more, more wrapping. I took a glance at the bouquet from the top occasionally to make sure it wasn’t too lopsided or oddly-shaped, but I really did not pay much attention to arranging the flowers. I just kind of grabbed them and taped them together. After about 5 minutes of wrapping, I had this.

Next, it was time to add the ribbon. I just tucked an end under and started wrapping. It didn’t need a lot of ribbon: maybe two feet total. I decided not to pin the entire thing for this bouquet because I intend to use this very piece of ribbon for the “real thing”. (I didn’t want to punch it full of holes during the trial.) But inserting the pins was easy: I just stuck each one in pointing down (toward the bottom of the bouquet) so that I won’t get poked while holding it. For the real bouquet, I think I will place them about a half-inch apart.

The next step after pinning on the ribbon would have been to trim down the stems to a uniform length. For my bridal bouquet, I will probably leave a few inches below the ribbon so that they can sit in water after being wrapped. I won’t leave them as long as these, though!

After I was done taking pictures and admiring this bouquet, I decided to unravel the ribbon and cut the floral tape off. One of the flowers couldn’t take the heat, I guess!

I put them all in a vase on our mantel (the broken one got its own vase). Pretty! We’ll see how long they last - they’ve been molested so much, I don’t have a lot of hope for their longevity. They’ve served me well though, so I’ll enjoy them while they last.

Surprisingly, wrapping my own bouquet was not hard to do at all. I thought it would be a pain in the ass; I was wrong. Maybe with multiple kinds of flowers it’d be a little more difficult, but man, I think it looks beautiful as-is. The entire process took about 40 minutes (and that includes the time I took to pause and take the photos above).

My wedding flowers will likely be a range of colors, and I will probably buy two bouquets (or a larger one, or at least some baby’s breath or something) to help make it appear fuller. I plan to buy them a day in advance. If you’re on the fence regarding whether you want make your own bouquet, I highly recommend trying it. I was pretty apprehensive about this DIY, but I’m not anymore! Since it took so little time, I’m confident that I’ll be able to wrap them the day of my wedding, too! It definitely wasn’t rocket science, even for an inexperienced n00b like myself.

And the best part? This beautiful bouquet cost under $15. That’s a little better than 5 flowers for $50, wouldn’t you say?

Are you considering arranging and wrapping your own bouquet?