Hi, my name is Cinnamon Bun, I’m getting married in less than 4 months (WHEN DID THAT HAPPEN?!) and wehaven’t booked a florist yet.
Speaking to a florist was actually one of the first things we did after getting engaged—Cinnamon Buns has a friend from high school who now owns her own floral shop in town. We went up there before I had a dress, before we had picked colours or theme, or anything. We brought Cinnamon Buns’ laptop, and showed her a mish-mash of pictures I thought were pretty. There was no theme or reoccurring pattern in these pics, apart from ‘flowers!!1!’ We talked about wrapping the stems, how there could be contrast ribbon, pearl pins, rhinestone blingy pins… it was a little overwhelming. She cut us a bit of a deal when she gave us a quote for what we wanted (1 bride bouquet, 2 BM bouquets, 3 boutonnieres) and it was still “Holy cow, flowers cost WHAT?” We went home to mull it over, and I came to some conclusions:
(purple source, yellow source)
I don’t like ribbon wraps like these ones, that go all the way down to the end of the stems. To me, it makes the bouquet look a little like a club. I imagine brides wandering around and hitting people with the stem end of the bouquet. I like it better when the stems stick out a bit, then you can see that it is made of actual plants, not concealing a billy club! Unfortunately from looking at her portfolio, high school contact seemed to only do this type of bouquet.
Another conclusion was that I was going to have a hard time picking flowers, because they’re all pretty! Then we chose teal and apple green as colours, and there aren’t many (if any) teal flowers. Green is, unsurprisingly, not a problem, but teal is harder. I didn’t want real flowers that had been dyed either. It was hard to pick, so I put it off, like I do with all hard decisions. Then I started seeing all sorts of other flowers in blogland: felt flowers, fabric flowers, ric-rac flowers, button flowers, paper flowers…
(source - this wedding was also the inspiration for our guys’ outfits!)
I was very taken with felt flowers for a while, but was never sure enough to make a few test ones. Paper flowers on the other hand seemed right up my alley. Especially as we have chosen a book ‘theme’!
I made a few Kusudama flowers:
Cute, but I had a hard time translating that shape to a boutonniere, and they’re very geometric: I wanted something a little more organic-looking for a bouquet. In comes this tutorial by Craft, Life & Laughs. Instead of using a flower punch, I found some simple flower shapes in the Silhouette shape shop, and had my magic machine cut the flowers out for me. I even edited the shapes a little so that the machine made all the cuts for me…no fiddly cutting out of 1 and 2 petal groups here! I’ll go into more detail about making them in another post, but here is what I ended up with:
The one above is a different flower shape, and had eight petals, not six. I think I like the other ones best.
As you can see, I played around a little with some of my Glimmer Mist (I mentioned it before in this post). I love how it just gives a subtle bit of colour, but still lets the printed page show through, not like paint that would cover everything up. I played with layering colours, I used a tealy blue (Dragonfly), a pale green (Lily Pad), a pink (Cherry Blossom), and a yellow (Banana Pudding Chalkboard Glimmer Mist). And, as you can tell, I left some un-coloured too. The floral wire I had just sitting around, it came from Michaels. It is cloth-covered 18 gauge, which felt a little thick and heavy for the smaller flowers, but not bad on the big one.
I really enjoy the look of these flowers, so does Cinnamon Buns, and I think all our wedding flowers will be made of these! I need to figure out something for leaves, I’m wondering if felt would look ok for leaves, or if I should stick with paper? Get a darker green Glimmer Mist? This bride (a big inspiration for me) seems to have satin-y leaves in a paper bouquet:
(source)
What do you think about non-traditional flower options?
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