If you are looking to make your own bouquet for your wedding, I would encourage you to consider a sola balsa wood flower bouquet. Why? Take a look at my daughter’s bridal bouquet.
If the picture doesn’t convince you, let me give you a few other reasons why a sola balsa wood flower bouquet and table arrangements might be the way to go. Besides, there are some of you out there in internet land that are looking to make sola wood bouquets and you are wondering whether to do it. You are scouring the net looking for photos (I found very few) so I’d like to share with you what we did and WHY. So here is why….
1. These flowers are unusual. We had the catering staff asking us about the flowers. They see a lot of weddings and none of the staff had seen flowers like ours.
2. The arrangements and bouquets you make will be something you can keep. My daughter Jenna and her husband Jake were married about a year ago. And now, 12 months later they have her beautiful bouquet to display in their home. Not only did we use the sola balsa wood in the bouquets, we used them in the table center pieces as well. It was fun to give some of arrangements away to those who helped with the wedding. At the end of this post I share some of the arrangements. I expect them to be “in style” for at least a few years before we’ll all want to toss them.
3. You can make them far ahead of the wedding day. If your wedding is DIY, the more you can do ahead of time, the better.
Unfortunately, I am not able to give you full instructions on how I made these bouquets. But I can give you a few tidbits and I can inspire you to begin researching like I did. I had never made a bouquet. I am not crafty that way. But I knew we would have to go this way in order to save money.
So why would an avid gardener make bouquets from WOOD flowers instead of real flowers? Here are my reasons:
1. We wanted to had to have a DIY wedding.
2. Jenna and Jake are creative people. She wanted a unusual bouquet.
3. If it was going to be a real flower bouquet, then for it to be unusual she wanted it to be made out of my own flowers, ones grown in my own Colorado backyard garden. In fact, this is what Jenna had dreamed about as a young girl. That would have been cool. But, she was getting married in February so that was not possible. I am not the Colorado Backyard Greenhouse Grower. It was, however a beautiful day and we got some great shots of my sweet girl outside.
4. Even so, I was the mother-of-the-bride. I didn’t want to make bouquets from real flowers the day before the wedding. I suppose I could have gone to Costco and bought some flowers. But that didn’t consider #3 and besides, I wanted to enjoy that week, not be a crazy person making floral bouquets at 2am. Note: I was still a crazy person.
4. When I got married back in 1983 I carried a 20 lb bouquet made out of silk flowers. I thought they were so pretty. And I supposed for the day they were. But I’m a gardener. I didn’t want to make my daughter’s bouquet out of synthetic flowers. And, I wanted to be able to see her dress in the pictures. My flowers covered my whole torso.
This left us with the option of dried flowers, which Jenna really liked. So I started to search for pictures onlines, pictures of dried floral arrangements. As I searched I came across sola balsa wood flowers. I gasped at their uniqueness. I sent a picture along to Jenna and she gasped too. This began my self-taught adventure in floral design.
I poked around the web and followed a variety of instructions. Here are a few places I went.
1. YouTube instruction video by Angel Aromatics. I followed this instruction so that I could put stems on the balsa wood flowers. I put long ones on the flowers we used in the table center pieces, and short stems that would poke into the hand-tied bouquet holder (mentioned below).
These instructions are what got me going to make the bridal bouquet, the bridesmaids bouquet, all the boutonnieres and corsages and all the table centerpiece arrangements. Whew! I still can’t believe I did that. But we saved a ton of money doing it. And shoot, the bouquet was a nice addition to this candid shot between my husband and our daughter. You can’t see it very well, but dangling from the bouquet is the pearl and teeny tiny diamond Dale gave me when we were dating.
I bought the Balsa wood flowers from a variety of sources.
1. Joann Fabric Stores. I live on the south end of Denver, near the Park Meadows Mall. They sell them. I believe you can also buy them online.
2. Etsy. There are several sellers there.
3. Save-On-Crafts.Com.
All these sources helped me put together bouquets just right for the bridal party.
I didn’t have to make boutonnieres for the men because Jake was born and raised on Kauai. His parents brought leis made out of tea leaves gathered from their island.
A few other tidbits:
1. I used a hand-tied bouquet holder to make it look like a hand tied bouquet. Go to this link to see what I mean.
2. While I liked the effect of this hand-tied holder, if I were to do it again, I would keep it easier than this and make them like the instruction video above, wrapping the entire stems with some type of fabric. Yet again, I really liked the hand-tied holder. Hmmm.
Check out these websites that have highlighted Jake and Jenna’s beautiful wedding! But before you do that, here is my family on that day. It was such fun. We will never look this good again.
Links to websites featuring Jake and Jenna’s wedding:
A few more pictures:
OK….I’ll stop.
Wait. One more. Me being kind of happy. I’m between my husband and Mom, the Mom my readers know. Doesn’t she look lovely? I was grateful for her caregiver who did an amazing job getting Mom ready and there — just in time. That is not easy with someone who has Alzheimers.)
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