How I made the vintage silk flower button holes for my wedding

In my previous posts I explained why and how I took on the challenge of making all my artificial wedding flowers. You can read here how I created my artificial wedding flower bouquet.

In this post I want to share how easy it was to make the 9 silk flower buttons holes for my now-husband and his groomsman.

What I used:

3x Luxury Artificial Sweet Peas Stem Cream Pink from Decoflora 

1 bunch of Artificial Forest Fern Plants in Green 

A roll of brown twine

A mini glue gun

Floral wire

Green stem wrap paper

Buttonhole pins with Diamante top

Wire cutters

I found these YouTube videos really useful and easy to follow.

To make a button hole I cut off a sweet pea flower as low down the stem as possible. Next a separated a part of the forest fern of a similar size, cutting it to fit if required. 

It’s important to create a stem with the forest fern so that the flower and fern can be wrapped together with green stem wrap easily. You may want to add in some floral wire to strengthen before wrapping.

Finally, I finished the buttonhole by wrapping it horizontally with brown twine. I used the mini glue gun after every few wraps of twine to ensure it stayed put.  

Voila! A little fiddly but quick and easy and I was able to create all 9 in about two evenings.


Subtle, vintage and chic. Though perhaps my husband was after something a bit more eye-catching....

Love 
LauraClaire

How to make your own beautiful Wedding Bouquet from silk flowers

Making your own wedding flowers can appear, at first, like a quite daunting task. However, it’s something I’d never done before and I found it simple and lots of fun to have full creative licence over the look of my bouquet. 

Plus, by using silk flowers I was able to keep my bouquet as a beautiful reminder of the day.

As you’ll see from my original post about my wedding flowers, I ended up hand-making everything flower-related from buttonholes for the groomsmen to flower posies for the tables. 

However, to keep things simple I’m going to run through the steps I took to make my own wedding bouquet using a gorgeous collection of silk flowers I picked online.

Firstly, I need to understand the basics of making a fake flower bouquet and where better to find out than YouTube!

I found these videos the most helpful and easy to understand.

5 things to remember are:

1. To cut up larger silk flowers/posies into single flowers. You can use wire and green stem paper to make the stem longer. It takes a while but gives you more flower for your money, more creative licence for how each flower sits and a better-looking bouquet.

2. Remember that you’ll usually want the bouquet to be symmetrical so consider buying enough duplicates of the same flowers.

3. Take enough time playing around with flower order and arrangement before securing the whole bouquet with stem paper. Try not to secure too high up the stems so that the bouquet has ‘room to breathe’ and is nicely spaced out.

4. Think about any other sentimental elements you might want to include in your bouquet and attach them with a glue gun to stem wire. I added pearl elements that were used in one of my best friend’s bouquet she gave to me as a gift from her wedding.

5. Choose 5 to 6 flowers for your bouquet of varying sizes. Then select at least 2 types of foliage to complement the flowers and fill space to ‘plump out’ the bouquet. These could be ferns, grasses or leaves.

For my wedding bouquet I wanted a muted, soft vintage look and so used a mixture of white, pink, cream and brown flowers. Having no idea where to start I looked online to get some ideas of best colour combinations.

My bouquet was 24cm in diameter and 33cm in height and used a combination of peony’s in peach and cream, pink sweet peas, chestnut brown roses, Lambs Ears in Dusky Pink, Magnolia, Ivy, Flocked Maidenhair Fern, coral flower buds and Snow Berries.

I was so pleased with the result and love that my wedding bouquet is everlasting. It now sits in a shabby chic vase in our bedroom.

So, are you tempted? If so, I’d love to know how you get on! 

But if it all seems a bit too much Amazon does some beautiful pre-made silk and artificial bouquets. These are a couple of my favourites below. Click on them to take a closer look. 

Love 

LC

In case you missed them... 
Easy Handmade Autumn Winder Wedding Place Cards

How I decorated my Reception Venue

Why I made my own wedding flowers 

The importance of an on-the-day wedding planner

Pastels and Floral LookBook

Flower Garlands: Topshop

Dresses: Missguided

Shoes: BooHoo

Jewellery: Forever21

Clutches and Purses: River Island

Heya Girlies, last month I had a poll up on the right hand column of my blog asking what everyone's favourite look was for this Spring. Well, we are now well into Summer so I thought I'd reveal the results. The winner was... Pastels and Florals. Bright Prints and Patterns came in second with not one pretty choosing Leather and Monochrome. This tells me that what's hot on the high street right now is COLOUR! Brilliant! I love it :) 

Above are a few pieces to inspire you to keep the Spring trend shining on through into Summer. Even if the sun isn't shining much, atleast our dresses will be! 

Check out my new poll on the right hand column, please let me know your opinion and get clicking <3

Love LauraClaire