Weddingbee Blog

I started on my flower arranging adventure with the boutonnieres for the gentlemen. I figured it was best to start small, and these are only a couple flowers each! I decided to use some of the blue roses I had made in the bouts. Our ‘best men’ will be wearing apple green shirts with ivory ties, and Cinnamon Buns will be wearing a teal shirt with an ivory tie.

The world’s longest bouts have both those colours! They’re super-long, because I made all our flowers with long stems for bouquet-making.

This one is Cinnamon Buns’. I decided that three flowers was a nice number, and picked through my blue bunch to give each man a very blue one, and a less blue one, plus one white one. Cinnamon Buns’ has a larger white flower than the other two. And yes, I did trim off that thread you see poking off the leaf in that photo.

Once I was happy with the arrangement of each, I wrapped everything in floral tape to secure them together. Floral tape doesn’t look like much, but as soon as you stretch it (like when you’re wrapping it around something with tension on it) it gets nice and sticky, so it sticks to itself. I wrapped for about 2″, then trimmed off the extra wire.

Floral tape on the left. I had some nice 1″ wide teal grosgrain ribbon hanging around (I bought a few rolls of various types and widths in our two wedding colours, and they’re so handy to have for stuff like this!) so I used that to wrap them. With help from Mrs Hyena and Miss Crepe‘s posts, the wrapping was achieved! I kept wanting to wrap from top down, but bottom up is the way to go. I cut about 5″-6″ of ribbon for each, and sealed both ends with our Mega Lighter:

Picture from BicWorld

Then a wee bit of hot glue at the bottom:

And wrap around:

I glued the ribbon on at a 90 degree angle to the wire so I could get one full wrap around the bottom to hide all the wires. After that, I angled the ribbon to get those nice layers you see. At the top, I used another dab of hot glue to stick the ribbon up there. I had to cut some extra ribbon off some of them, because I wanted the end of the ribbon to be at the back. I re-sealed the ribbon with the lighter, while having the thought that firing up a BBQ lighter in such close vicinity to so much nice dry paper was probably a bad idea, but I managed to keep the flames just to the ribbon.

I tried a couple of embellishments on the stems that you can see in the above photos - thin green ribbon and some baker’s twine. I showed them all to Cinnamon Buns, and he thinks that the baker’s twine might end up looking like a loose thread when it is against a black suit, so we decided (probably) that his will have thin green bow (with much shorter tails than the one in the photo!) and the other mens’ will just be the blue grosgrain.

We’re thinking large safety pins to secure them, because the pin can be entirely hidden by the lapels of their jackets.

I’m so happy to have these done well before the wedding!