Weddingbee Blog

If you recall, a few posts ago I showed you some very drool-worthy inspiration photos for my bridal bouquets (vintage fabric floral beauties =aaaahhhhmazing!).

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As you may have guessed, I decided to try my hand at creating my very own vintage beauties using some leftover fabric and supplies I had on hand.

To keep you in the loop and update you on my progress, here is a brief overview of supplies used and steps taken thus far:

Supplies:

• 2 yards of a linen blend of ivory fabric (free from my sister)
• a homemade template of a 5 petal “flower”
• all purpose thread
• a needle
• craft felt
• fabric covered floral wire
• lighter and a candle’s flame

Step 1: Cut out a template using a sturdy material (e.g. heavy weight cardstock).

Step 2: Use that template to trace your pattern onto your fabric of choice. (I used what looked to be a linen blend, a cotton-poly blend would be best to achieve proper burns on your edges.)

**TIP: To save time double over the fabric a couple times so you can cut multiple pieces at one time. To keep fabric in place while cutting you may find it useful to pin all the layers together.

Step 3: Use a lighter or candle to burn the edges of your fabric. (I found that to achieve the look I wanted I actually needed to ignite the fabric for a brief moment and to blow it out quickly, but this could also be the pyro in me and different fabrics will react differently. It would be a good idea to do some tests first.)

**Warning: do use caution while playing with fire (I wouldn’t want anyone to singe their fingers).

**TIP: To save time layer 2-3 pieces of your cut pattern and burn while they are layered. This will save you tons of time and having the fabric layered will also save you from over-burning the edges.

Step 4: Layer your petal pieces so that they are rotated slightly each time to fill in any possible empty spaces. I used 5 petal pieces per flower and was met with pretty full flowers.

Step 5: Pull out your needle and thread and begin stitching the pieces together.

• With the pieces all layered on top of each other pull your needle and thread through the center of the flower pieces from the bottom up.

• Run a stitch through the base of each petal (base is closer to the center) so that it goes through all 5 layers of petals.

• Pull the stitch back to the center of the flower and repeat with each petal. (Your flower will begin to take shape and the petals will pucker up)

• Once all your petals are puckered up together you can begin to randomly place stitches in various petals to achieve a fluffy floral look. It’s hard to really describe this in an accurate way, but what I did was place the needle through either the top or bottom of varying petals and pulled it through to the center of the flower to crinkle and shorten different petals. (The photo below is my best attempt at documenting this process.

**Unfortunately, I didn’t do a great job of documenting the stitching process, but I plan to add a repeat (very stitch specific) tutorial of the this step.

After a bunch of carefully/haphazardly placed stitches you should get a pretty flower that looks like this:

Step 6: Repeat steps 2-6 as many times as needed to get the fabric flower yield you would like.

Step 7: Attach the floral wire to the flower using needle, thread and craft felt. Again, I didn’t do a great job of documenting this process, but I promise a much more detailed tutorial is coming up soon.

Step 8: Admire. Bunch your finished flowers together and place in a vase for a quick and easy photo shoot and realize you are going to need a lot more than 3 measly flowers.

Step 9: Try and figure out what kind of flower you just made so you don’t look like an ass when you are trying to explain them to someone (it would probably be a good idea to know this before you start the project…oops!). I think these look sorta like peonies. Don’t you?

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Overall, this project has started out smooth and with little error. I did learn a few things and would like to try a few different methods for some variation in the bouquet (e.g. using different templates/fabrics to create various flowers). I am not quite sure what the final product will look like, but I am quite hopeful and very excited to see the outcome.

What do you think? Are you DIYing your bridal bouquets?