Weddingbee Blog

Waaaaay back when I first started blogging I attempted a DIY project that I never told you about. Why? Because, right up until the week of the wedding I couldn’t decide if I was going to use them or not, and I wasn’t ready to expose them to the blog world in case I changed my mind. I know…lame. But that’s what happened.

The project? Fabric flowers. Like many other brides out there, I decided to try my hand at these after seeing numerous tutorials online. The method I used was the same as the one as Miss Pancake’s, so I’m going to be lazy and point you to her tutorial here.

I was living in a student dorm when I made them, and we weren’t allowed candles in our rooms so I made the flowers in the communal kitchen over a gas element which resulted in many burnt flowers and strange looks…but in the end I had six of these:

I attached pearl beads and antique brooch pieces to the flower centres.

I liked the flowers, but for a while I didn’t love them. This was when I was having trouble visualising how everything would “go” together at the wedding, and I couldn’t decide whether the flowers would be too much, or just right.

You know how my bridesmaids’ wore wrist corsages? Well, in the end, I decided to present the fabric flowers I made to our mums, grandmothers, and a couple other VIP women to make them stand out a little like the bridesmaids. I sewed a length of ribbon to the back of each flower, and then tied each flower to a hand fan. On the day, some of the women wore the flowers on their wrists, and some left them as fan decorations. When I first saw photos from the day, the flowers looked just right amongst everything else at our wedding. Funny how sometimes you can’t see that before the day!

I didn’t want to leave the men out either! Mr E’s buttonhole was made by our florist to match my bouquet, but for the groomsmen, dads, and grandfathers I made buttonholes out of dried lavender picked from my parents’ garden.

The beauty of dried lavender is that you can make the buttonholes ahead of time. I used florist tape and leftover lace to wrap the stems and pinned each buttonhole to a little label in a basket so each man would know which buttonhole was his. They weren’t elaborate, but they worked.

So now that I have alleviated my feelings of guilt over not sharing the fabric flowers with you before now, have you ever had mixed feelings over one of your own DIY projects?

*All photos in this post are personal