Weddingbee Blog

From day one of this wedding planning I decided I didn’t want real flowers, so I jumped onto the paper-flower train.

I practiced paper flowers and even made enough for half a bouquet, but then I stumbled on a thread in the boards by hive member Robin Sparkles, who proudly showed us her wood bouquet.

Image via Robin Sparkles on Weddingbee

Isn’t it gorgeous? So, in the most innocent, platonic way I clicked over to the site she ordered them from, Accents and Petals, and started drooling over those masterpieces.

I sent Cousin P the link and asked her to play devil’s advocate and convince me it was not unreasonable to order some flowers. She did her job and even ordered some music sheet flowers herself, and in less than a month we had our beautiful flowers.

I didn’t order a bouquet, but I ordered a (more affordable) package of 150 natural wood roses that I intend to turn into my bridal bouquet. Easier said than done.

At first I intended to glue the flowers to a foam ball, but I later decided to glue them to individual stems and try to shape them that way.

Now, these roses are exquisite, but I got greedy and wanted some color. So my mom told me to just buy some paint and dip them in it. I did exactly that with brown paint and a mix of red and yellow paint to make orange. I created different shades of brown, adding more water to the mix.

I dipped every flower in the paint mixture and let them dry overnight. Tip: Do not use plain paint—it is thick and acts like a coat. It has to be watered down, that way the wood absorbs it and it dyes the wood.

I made individual stems of floral wire and wrapped them in floral tape and hot glued them to every flower.

Then, I started wrapping them:

Almost 80 flowers later:

I’m thinking about adding some dried baby’s breath and wrapping the stems in ribbon.

What do you think? Any suggestions?