Weddingbee Blog

Alternative title: “I’m Lazy”

Just a quick post today to show you a preview of a project my sisters and I worked on over Christmas. I knew from the beginning that our budget (would it be helpful for me to post a breakdown of our budget?) wouldn’t allow for a huge flower allowance. I toyed with the idea of buying flowers wholesale and just arranging them myself—but I discarded the idea after realizing that one, I’m not a florist and two, the week of the wedding is already going to be insanely busy with graduation. In fact, in the entire planning process, we have the most events (wedding or non-wedding) scheduled for the week of the wedding. Also known as—we need to get everything done ahead of time. So, even though some bees have rocked doing their own fresh flowers, this girl needs a fake alternative!

The good news is that there are a lot of different ways and materials to make flowers. First up were crepe flowers.

Image via Design Improvised

I actually tried making these beautiful crepe flowers. Mine didn’t turn out quite like the ones in the picture, however. First off, I couldn’t find crepe paper sheets to experiment with, much less anything in coral. Second, I couldn’t get the hang of manipulating the floral tape and wire. Basically, I’m lazy and this was too hard.

There are also paper flowers, which are absolutely beautiful (especially out of pages of books or music)…but incredibly time consuming.

Image via Etsy / Photo by annemusingdesigns

Fabric flowers fall into the same category, although if purchased are more expensive than real flowers sometimes—check out the price on this one! The upside to this, of course, is that you have a beautiful bouquet that lasts forever.

Image via Cultivar on Etsy / Photo by Katie Reim

That leaves tissue paper flowers. There are lots of tutorials out there, but we used this tutorial from Martha Stewart. Honestly, it was so, so easy. And it didn’t take up days and days. We did both bridesmaids’ bouquets and my bouquet in less than two hours (two and a half episodes of Leverage). We also made some extra flowers and started on bigger poms for table and hanging decorations.

Do they look expensive and fancy? No. Is our wedding expensive and fancy? No, so it looks like they’ll fit right in! Tissue paper flowers were perfect for the time we wanted to put in and the money we wanted to spend (about $20 including floral wire and way more tissue paper than I needed).

This is my sister modeling her bouquet made with coral, light blue, and light yellow tissue paper. I’m planning on wrapping the stems in floral tape and maybe adding a page of a book and some ribbon around the stems.

Oh, and the stems? My dad pulled out his electric drill to twist the wire on those. When my dad participates in wedding planning, he does it in a big way, you guys. I highly recommend it because those stems are rigid now!

Anyone else make their own bouquets? To anyone who did their own fresh flowers or paper flowers—you’re awesome!