Wedding Planning Blog Friday, February 6, 2009 How to Make your Own Bridal Bouquet Do you want to learn how to make your own bridal bouquet? If so, there are a few things you will need to think about and some problems you will need to avoid. Here are some tips for making a bridal bouquet. 1. Decide exactly what you want If you can decide exactly what you want before you get started this will help a lot. You need to think about what kinds of flowers and colours you want. It is very difficult to carry a colour in your memory so if you have anything that you need the colors to match with, such as shoes or a headband, take it with you when you go to order the flowers. 2. Choose your flowers Roses work very well in a bridal bouquet and it is traditional to have an odd number of flowers, for example, 7 or more. You will need to find roses that have stems of around 1 foot long. If you are choosing a different type of flower be careful as certain types of flowers may droop or wilt before you make it to the ceremony. Many brides like to use the same flowers in the bouquet that they use to decorate the church or other ceremony location. Even if you do not use the exact same flowers you will probably want to come up with some sort of theme and make sure that they don't clash. 3. Choose some leaves for your bouquet This is a very important step. A lot of brides do not realize how important it is and just grab something at the last minute, but the foliage that will surround and separate the flowers can make or break a bride's bouquet. You will can use a mix of leaves and grasses that go together well. Like the flowers, you need to know they will not droop or discolour. 4. Think about other materials for your bouquet As well as the flowers and green leaves, you will need scissors, a knife, ribbon in colors to match your flowers and some floral tape. You can buy floral tape in a craft store or flower store. 5. Plan Time to create your Bouquet It can be time consuming make a bridal bouquet. Put it on a checklist so that you do not forget. It can be made the evening before and left in water, but remember to make sure that the ribbons do not get in the water. You can leave the bouquet in the fridge if the weather is hot. 6. How to Create your Bridal Bouquet Set out all your materials and prepare your flowers. Strip or cut leaves from the stem to give the bouquet a better shape, and remove any older petals or flowers. Next prepare the leaf stems in the same way. Holding them all together in one hand to make a rounded head, place the flowers between the leaves so that the bouquet retains a well rounded shape and the flowers and leaves are evenly distributed. Then add flowers all around the outside of the leaves. The stems will naturally fan out under your hand. Check the shape and then wrap the floral tape tightly around the stems just above where you are holding the bouquet. Go around 3 times then with the tape holding the bouquet tightly, put it down and tie the ribbons around it. Finally, cut all the stems to the same length, about 6 inches below the lower part of the ribbon. That's it. If you have followed these steps, you hopefully now know how to make your own bridal bouquet. Labels: wedding flowers posted by S Thomson @ 9:04 AM 0 comments Wednesday, May 28, 2008 Wedding Church Decoration Tips Are you getting married in a Church? Have you been looking for some Church Decoration Tips? If so, read on for some ideas The type of decorations for your church wedding will depend on the location of your wedding, the time of year that you are getting married and the theme of your wedding if you are having a theme. Here are a few wedding church decoration tips for those of you going for a traditional wedding. Flowers are one of the things that you need to think about first - a wedding would look very dull without them! as well as being important for decoration of the church, flowers are also a big feature in all of the different locations and stages of the wedding. You could even create a colour theme to your wedding just by co-ordinating all of the flowers, including your own bouquet, the bridesmaid bouquets, the corsages worn by the mother of the bride and mother of the groom as well as the buttonhole flowers of the groom and his best man and ushers. Usually in at a church wedding there are flowers at the altar, in the lobby and along the aisle on the ends of the rows of seats. You probably also want to have flowers on the tables at your wedding reception and you may want to use similar colours or types of flowers to the ones you used to decorate the church. The flowers that you decide on will depend on all sorts of things including the colours and the style of your wedding dress, the bridesmaid's dresses, the type of rooms that you are using, and also the time of year. You can reduce the cost of your wedding flowers by using flowers that are in season at the time of year of your wedding. Your florist will be able to advise you of this and show you photos and examples of flowers. Unless you have had some experience of flower arrangement you probably will not want to arrange the flowers yourself. This is one of these last-minute tasks and even if you do have flower arrangement skills you will no doubt have so much do on the morning of your wedding. Some florists may set the arrangements up for you without extra cost if you order all of the flowers from them. Alternatively you could have a friend do it or perhaps find someone through the church that you are getting married in. Another way to decorate the church is with candles. The church will probably already have standard candles and candleholders that they can supply but you may want to supply your own to make them more individual. Be sure to speak to the minister or priest about doing this first. Just looking through some wedding magazines or catalogs may give you lots of other wedding church decoration tips. You will also get lots of ideas by visiting wedding fairs. Labels: church wedding, wedding flowers posted by S Thomson @ 5:56 AM 0 comments