Fabric Wedding Bouquets

From the moment I got engaged last October, I knew I wanted to make a fabric bouquet. There were a number of reasons for this. Firstly, I hated the idea of dying flowers. Just. Plain. Wasteful. Secondly, I really wanted to make my wedding meaningful to me and handcrafting the bouquets did just that. I started off experimenting with polyester fabrics when I made some satin flower pins for my girlfriends that attended my stagette.

With the same idea in mind, I set out to create a variety of different types of satin flowers. I love the look of the melted edges of satin. It made each flower unique in it's own way and no two flowers would ever look the same. I purchased some white, ivory and champagne colored satin along with some organza and tulle. I tried cutting out a bunch of different shapes to see what they would look like melted. I ended up using a lot of circles, ovals, and flower shaped pieces. Some used only one color of satin while other flowers used a combination of fabrics and colors. 

That was a quick photo I took with my phone one night. I used a hot glue gun to attach all the pieces, something that saved me loads of time because with the original flower pins I made for the girls, I hand stitched the petals together. Not smart. After making what seemed like a hundred individual flowers, I embellished them with some bling. Some had rhinestones in the middle and some had glass beads. Flowers can't be flowers without stems so I attached floral stems that I purchased at Michael's and Dollar Giant using floral tape and more hot glue. Then I bunched them all together to make my wedding and 2 bridesmaids' bouquets. 

I made my bouquet bigger than the rest,  2 medium sized bouquets for my bridesmaids and one itty bitty one for the bouquet toss.  I didn't want a red bouquet and after looking at pictures of red and white bouquets, I decided against that too. To incorporate red into my bouquet, I just wrapped the stems in a red satin ribbon. They turned out way better than I expected. Future plans for my bouquet you might ask? I was hoping to make a shadow box with my wedding stuff... Haven't gotten that far yet though.