Wedding bouquet & boutonniere

A step-by-step guide to making your own wedding bouquet (suitable for brides and bridesmaids). Save tons of $$ and get your flowers exactly how you want them to look.

Also, make boutonnieres for the guys with the "scraps"!

Step 1 Why make your own wedding bouquet?

I put together my trial bouquet & boutonniere with grocery-store flowers, a bit of florist tape and wire and some ribbon.

The flowers include one bunch of mixed flowers ($20), a dozen small roses ($13) and a few stems of lilies ($8) - in all, this cost me just over $40... I didn't use the lilies in the end, but will talk about those a bit.

I did the trial about 1 month before my wedding, then repeated the same process for the wedding itself. Flowers turned out great - and cost me just over $120 for 3 bridesmaids & 1 big bride bouquet, 6 boutonnieres, 1 fancy boutonniere, and 2 ladies corsages (like the boutonnieres). Some florists were going to charge me exactly this much for my bridal bouquet alone!

Here is what all the "raw material" flowers looked like - keep these in water throughout the process.

Comments

[alanfindaly]

Your bouquets look very well done. I will sometimes try to grow the types of flowers I plan to use if the climate permits it. That way I'm (almost) guaranteed to have what I need and save money in the process. I also find caring for the flowers to be very relaxing.

- canadawideflowers.ca

[ckoehler1904]

I helped my step-daughter make her bouquet, crosages and boutonniers the day before her recent out-of town wedding. The methods you described were very similar to what we did - and we saved major dollars. All of the flowers were painstakingly selected by her to match the color theme of the wedding (burnt orange and gold for an amazing Indian wedding). However, we made the mistake of trusting the hotel that we stayed in to keep the flowers safe in their walk-in food cooler. Just 90 minutes before the wedding began we discovered that the bride's bouquet had been frozen solid. Fortunately, her two gay "uncles" (using an iPhone) were able to locate the only florist in town still open that weekend. They drove at breakneck speed to arrive just before the shop closed. In mere minutes they all crafted a reasonable floral facsimile and then spent a half hour sweating bullets while stuck in a bumper-to-bumper interstate traffic jam. The uncles arrived with bouquet in hand with just minutes to spare. Moral of the story: "Be careful how and where you store your floral creations!" BTW, great Instructable....

[pingeee]

I like the pink one. Well done

[Mr. Rig It]

Wow, what great pictures. May I suggest adding a materials/supplies and tools step, I think this would help your instructable. Where was this for the flower contest?? It would have been a great entry.