Weddingbee Blog

Before the wedding, I posted about making paper flowers, fabric leaves, and then again about putting the paper boutonnières together. The original plan was 3 boutonnières and 3 bouquets—flowers just for the wedding party.

Between getting engaged and about March, I waffled over whether I wanted real or paper flowers. As you know, I chose to make paper flowers. I purposely didn’t tell Cinnamum about this decision until she asked me directly: “What are you doing for flowers?”And when I told her I was making them out of book paper, I got the expected silence on the other end of the line. I emailed a few photos to her after that conversation, and never received any feedback on them. A few days passed, and I got a phone call. This phone call nearly put me over the edge. It was all, “Are you doing it to save money? We can send more money! I can buy flowers and arrange them the morning of the wedding! We can go to Safeway! You need real flowers!”

I don’t think it was ever said in so many words, but the impression was that paper flowers would look cheap and childish and a real wedding needed real flowers. That time, I was the one emanating silence from the other end of the line.

After that phone call, I fell into a crafting slump.

I didn’t do anything with the paper flowers for weeks. I was thisclose to phoning Cinnamum up and saying, :Fine, if you care that much about the flowers, they’re your job now. Do as you will, I don’t feel like giving input into this thing I don’t really want, but I’d rather have you off my back.” Cinnamon Buns, rock star that he his, talked me out of doing that. He told me to just keep going with my plan, and not to talk about flowers with my mum. So, that’s what I did. I ignored the emails I got about reasonably priced florists in Calgary, and plugged away at my paper flowers.

Somewhere in here, we agreed to do bouts for the parents. I’m still not entirely sure where that came from, but it happened! I do remember that at that point I’d used up all the flowers in the bridesmaids’ bouquets, so I had to make more. Luckily not too many more—3 flowers per bout, 6 more bouts total. This time, I cut out a few more shapes too, in case anything else came up. The dad bouts were just the same as Cinnamon Buns’ and the groomsmen’s, except I wrapped them in ivory ribbon, not teal, and I used a different leaf fabric than I did for the boys’:

The mothers’ were a little different. Cinnamon Buns’ mum had said she’d rather have a pin than a wrist corsage, so I made that one just like the dad’s bouts. My mum and Cinnamon Buns’ step mum I wasn’t sure about. My mum I was unsure about because (a) she hated the idea of these flowers to begin with. I couldn’t not make her one, but would she refuse to wear it? Wear it and hate it? And (b) I knew she was planning on wearing a big pin on her dress, so pins were out. I decided to go the wrist corsage route for her and step-mum-C-Bun.

I knew I wanted basically the same layout as the others—3 flowers, one leaf, but it took a while to figure out exactly how to put everything together and have it on a ribbon. I decided to make them tie-on corsages simply because I didn’t have any elastic at home, and I wanted to get them done NOW. I knew they’d need a backing of some sort, so I pulled out some ivory felt (I love my well of craft supplies!).

The leaf got hot glued down first.

Then the next two flowers. To get the third flower sitting nicely, I had to cut the wire off and glue it down that way. The first time, I glued that one right on to what you see in the above photo. Then I realised I’d have to attach the ribbon to the back of the felt, and that just wouldn’t be as pretty. So I pulled off flower #3, and glued the ribbon down (I cut it to 24″ to have lots to tie on to the mum’s wrists):

Then I glued wire-less flower #3 on top of the ribbon.

After that, trim the felt so it is still behind the ribbon and the bottom of the leaf. This way no wires or glue blobs will scratch your ladies’ wrists!

It felt pretty darn good to finish those, I have to say.

One of my bridesmaids had asked if there were any spare flowers that I could put on bobby pins for their hair. BM K has quite short hair, so fun accessories are how she usually dresses it up. I took those spare flowers I cut out, and put them together onto a bobby pin instead of a wire. Here is the post where I detail how I glued the flowers together onto a wire. Instead of poking a wire through the centre of the biggest flower, I poked a hole through the centre with a toothpick, and then made another hole 1/4″ away, and threaded the bobby pin through that.

Then splodge glue and the other flower bits in as in the other post.

After about 10 bobby pins, I was for really done with paper flowers.

And just so I don’t leave you in suspense… Cinnamum loved the paper flowers on the day. She apologized for what she said, and even said she was *gasp* wrong about it, and seeing them in person they were beautiful.

Did any of your projects take on a life of their own and just grow? Do you have any satisfying stories of your ideas proving non-believers wrong?