A Beautiful Bouquet

My friend Bianca has made an utterly amazing yo-yo coat.  Which I got to see in person at Quilt Market Houston.  To. Die. For.  Honestly.

As Bianca posted in November about making some mends to her yo-yo's after swishing and sweeping about the Houston convention center, I was inspired to show you my own yo-yo project: the crafty bridal bouquet I made back in 2014.

Ok, you can't really see the yo-yo action in this picture, so I'll have to take some of my own pix, just to highlight the details.

(Wedding photographers are not paid to get detail shots of the DIY elements.  For good reason, I suppose.  Still extremely happy with everything New Morning Photography was able to capture.)

The beginning stages of this process were documented in early 2014, when I started wiring up various buttons, brooches, yo-yos and such; then tried (unsuccessfully) to put them into a bouquet shape; then tried a second construction method by working with a friend (more successfully).  But darn it, in the lead-up to the wedding, I neglected to actually blog the completed project.  Which is just a crying shame.

All crafty finishes deserve their moment in the blogging spotlight.

Basic yo-yo tools, while not absolutely necessary, definitely speed up the process.  And I LOVE the heart-shaped one! (Who wouldn't, I ask you?)

My favorite yo-yo heart, made from scraps of the heavy satin used to make my sister's wedding dress, got given extra oomph from a tiny dark purple silk yo-yo (lighter weight fabrics fared better in the small yo-yos), and a lilac bead.

In fact, for this project, every yo-yo was paired with beads or buttons (or both!), to make more of a statement within the bouquet.

My siblings: we clean up nice!

In the end, it was the event that was special here.  But my amazing, DIY bouquet really was (and is!) beautiful, full of memories associated with the brooches, earrings, buttons and yo-yo's that went into making it. 

Brief construction details

With help from extra hands, I finally got my crafty bridal bouquet all put together.  (See Take 1 and Take 2 posts for how we got to here.)

The big change this time around was twisting groups of stems together into clusters.  Each cluster then worked as a single element to thread through the fake hydrangea bouquet.



I made about 10 clusters, using around two-thirds of the approximately 80 individual stems.

The clusters were then inserted, one at a time, into the fake hydrangea as before.  I had an extra person helping me (mandatory), and we wrapped each cluster around the branches of the hydrangea and then continued wrapping down around the stem area to keep everything secured. 

Under construction: Take 3

Unlike the previous attempt, this version managed to have the brooches/buttons/bling be the star, rather than the hydrangea overtaking and swallowing all the bits I was trying to insert.

View from underneath it all

 Once we had all the stems/clusters arranged, all that remained was to make the "stem" be able to be held in one's hand.  It was already plenty thick, with massive amounts of wire wrapped all along the fake bouquet's original stem.
 

Buttons? No, corsage pins

Still a 2-person job: We wrapped the hefty wired stem with 2 layers of polyester quilt batting, and then wrapped a rectangle of the heavy bridal satin fabric around the whole thing.  The raw edges of the fabric were just folded under (ironed to hold the folds in place).  And the whole shebang was secured with corsage pins--a heavy-duty pin with decorative pearly head, that I had no worries about bending or ruining (I think they came in a package of 100).
 

That's it!  The key to this project being a success was starting early and having plenty of patience for the complexity of what I was trying to accomplish.

Here are links to the things I used/found helpful in making my own crafty bouquet:

Blue Petyl, who wrote the best cautionary tale on the brooch bouquet process, has an eBook, various DIY kits, and sells completed bouquets from their Etsy shop.

My favorite YouTube video, among the many I consulted, was by Jessica Flores, who has the same video plus more info on her own website, Domesticated Me (so I'm including links for both). 

Weddings can be so magical!  And we worked very hard to make ours so personalized.  From the family stash of buttons/brooches/earrings that were included in my bouquet, down to the sand we used in our sand ceremony (mine from Puget Sound, Sweetie's from Virginia Beach).  I wish you all the best as you CRAFT a wedding that makes you feel magical, too.