DIY Wedding Bouquet: A Florist's Secret Tips

Hello flower friends! Are you dreaming of creating your own wedding bouquet? You can totally do it and I'm here to help. My name is Ellen Frost and I'm creating a community of flower nerds online by sharing knowledge and creating connections. In today's video I'm going to show you how to make a stunning DIY wedding bouquet using tips and tricks that florists use so that your flowers look both professional and beautiful for your special day. And if you're one of my flower nerds be sure to subscribe to my free weekly flower newsletter. The link is in the description. The first tip that I'm going to share with you is around when to get your flowers so that you can have a stress-free DIY experience. If you are buying flowers from a wholesaler, which a lot of people do, you want to be sure to get your flowers at least two days before the wedding. And if you're buying your flowers locally, like we do, you can get your flowers the day before because they won't need as much conditioning as the flowers from the wholesaler. If you're getting them from a wholesaler, you want to, they're going to come in a box out of water. So you want to make sure that you unpack them, trim the stems, trim the bottom of the stems, and put them in water right away. If you're getting them from a local grower like we do, they're going to come in water. So those you can just set aside until you're ready to prepare them. The preparing of your flowers is going to take a while. This is the thing that actually takes the most amount of time in the design, is the preparation. So you have all of your flowers. The first thing that you want to do is you want to clean every stem. And I'm going to say that if you are cleaning by yourself, you're cleaning all the stems yourself, I would give yourself at least two hours. The first thing you want to do is take off all of the leaves. You want this stem to look exactly how you want it to look in your bouquet. So you don't want to be doing any cleaning on the day of the design. So once you have all of your flowers cleaned and prepared and in a vase soaking up water, you can really just let them sit. You can set them aside and you don't have to do the design right away. Actually, it's probably good if you do give them a little bit of time just to soak up water, hydrate. And if you're doing this two days before the wedding, you want to do your design the day before the wedding. You can just set these in a cool place. I wouldn't suggest putting them in your home refrigerator. Just in a cool room with the lights off would work totally fine. Another tip I want to share with you is how to choose the right mix of flowers for your wedding bouquet. Of course, you can choose, you know, an all rose bouquet and that is a simple classic look. But if you're looking for something that has more texture and more interest, my tip to you is to choose a mix of flowers and foliage that are going to create a really interesting, unique look for you. So these are the elements that I suggest you look for when you're choosing your flowers. The first one are line flowers. I suggest having at least one type of line flower in your bouquet. And a line flower is just a flower that grows up the stem and is shaped in this line formation. The next is filler flowers. So in this case, this was a snapdragon. In this case, the filler flowers for this bouquet are going to be alstroemeria and hellebores. And what these are, are more like background flowers. They're pretty, but they're not the focus of the bouquet. What this is going to do is help have bulk and interest in your bouquet, but they're really going to be more in the background. Then you're going to have your focal flowers. And your focal flowers are really the flowers that are the wow element in your bouquet. So in this case, I'm going to be using ranunculus. They are a really wow flower. Everybody loves them. I'm also going to use some secondary focal flowers, which in this case are going to be tulips and freesia. These could be used as focal flowers themselves, but in this case, they're going to be the backup to the ranunculus. The ranunculus is going to be the star, and these are going to be sort of the supporting flowers. Next, I always like to have some foliage in my bouquet. So try to get some foliage, some leafy green foliage. It could be anything. In this case, I'm going to use scented geranium. This has the added bonus of being very fragrant and making your bouquet smell great. And then lastly, I like some little bits and pieces, which in this case are these totally adorable daffodils. They are going to add just a little bit of whimsy and interest, and they also are fragrant, so they're going to add some fragrance to the bouquet. So if you can, I suggest having this mix of elements for your DIY wedding bouquet. I can't emphasize enough how important it is to practice before your wedding day. You do not want to be making your wedding bouquet as the first bouquet you've ever made ever in your life. Definitely spend some time practicing making bouquets ahead of time, you know, either a couple weeks, even a month, even more. Practicing your bouquet technique so that on the day that you're designing your wedding bouquet, you're feeling relaxed and comfortable and confident in creating your bouquet. The next tip to prepare you in creating your wedding bouquet is to lay all of your flowers out on a table so that the design process is really easy. You want to be able to see all of your elements right in front of you as you're designing. So I like to just match up all of my types of flowers together. All right, so now it's time to create your bouquet, and what I'm going to do now is show you a very simple spiral technique, and the spiral technique does take practice, which is why I said practice ahead of time so that you're not making your bouquet for the first time that day. And the idea around the spiral technique is that you are going to be placing stems in a pattern so that your bouquet feels very balanced. So I like to start with a strong stem. So my snapdragons here, you can see this is a pretty strong stem. So I like to start with that, and what I'm going to do is I'm going to just go down my list here, my list of flowers, and I'm going to place them one after another in a pattern. So I'm going to take my second flower, and I'm going to show you this technique here. So the way that you're going to place your flowers for a spiral technique is to hold the first flower in your non-dominant hand. So I'm right-handed, and I'm holding my first flower in my left hand, and I'm going to take my next flower, and I'm going to cross it over in an X formation. You see that? So every time you lay a flower down, you're going to actually put it in that X formation. So I've put my first flower down. Now this is the trick that is hard, and this does take practice. You're going to actually take the entire two stems, your entire bouquet, and turn it about a quarter turn while you're holding on to it. The next stem is going to be placed in that same X shape. Then give it a quarter turn. Your entire bouquet turns a quarter. It's not just turning your wrist. You're turning the entire bouquet a quarter, and my next stem goes on top in that X formation. Then I'm giving it a quarter turn, and I am considering the length of my stems. I do want to have some variation in the length of my stems. So my tulip, I'm going to pop out a little bit higher, give my twist. My next stem goes in that same formation, and you're just going to keep following along in this pattern. When you're finished with all of your stems, you're going to go back to your first stem. Give it that cross. Give it a quarter turn, and the more stems you put in, your hand is going to start to get kind of full, but you want to leave leave a loose grip on it. You don't want to have what I call the death grip, which is like this tight grip on your stems. You really want to just keep them between like your thumb and your forefinger, or even your middle finger, and a light grip so that you can keep that nice light, that nice garden style look. So once you get towards the end here, you can make some adjustments by placing stems right in the middle if you feel like you are missing a few things, or pull things out if they are getting lost. So this one big ranunculus here, I'm going to actually just stick down here in the middle. You can see I'm just sliding it through and adding it to my stems. I'm going to do the same thing with this last snapdragon because there are a little bit of a hole for the snapdragons here. So once your bouquet is finished, you feel good about how it looks, feel good about the design, give it another little trim just so you have some, it doesn't have to be super even, but just clean it up a little bit so it's easier to handle. And then you're going to use your floral tape to wrap your bouquet. So if you've never used floral tape before, floral tape feels kind of papery, but when you pull on it, it has a resin inside of it that actually sticks to itself. So I'm going to use this one inch floral tape and if you can see, I'm going to just hold on to it on my bouquet with my thumb and then I'm going to wrap it around, pulling it tight, and then that floral tape is actually going to stick to itself. Even though my stems are wet, it's still going to just stick to, stick to itself. All right, so now you can see I've got my bouquet taped and I feel comfortable just setting it aside now, putting it back into my, into my vase, making sure that all of the stems are in water. You want to double check if you see any stems that are not in water, just add a little bit of water. This is it for the day before the wedding. You're not going to add any ribbons, pins, anything like that until the wedding day because what will happen is that the water will get taken up through the stems, your ribbon will get dirty, you really want to do those things at the very last minute. So once you've got it to this point, you can just set it aside, wait till you're ready to do your final wrapping. Okay, so now it's the wedding day and you're ready to finish your bouquet. You're going to take it out of its water, so double check your tape. You might need to put another piece of tape on because sometimes if the tape overnight gets wet or you might just need a little reinforcement, so I like to just put another piece right on top. Now I'm ready to do my ribbon wrap and you want to make sure you have all of your tools right in front of you when you're doing a ribbon wrap. You don't want to be running to find things, so you want your clippers, a fabric scissors, your floral tape, some pins, your ribbon, and then a clean towel and your vase of water. You want to have all of this set up before you're ready to do your ribbon wrap. So for a wedding bouquet, I like to use a one inch ribbon. This is a double faced satin, but you can use any kind of one inch ribbon. You can use a bigger or smaller ribbon, but this is my preferred size. And I'm going to do the wrap just the same as I did my tape wrap. So I'm going to place the ribbon at the bottom of the tape, really at the pinch point where your hand is going to be on the bouquet. I'm going to hold it with my thumb. I'm going to leave it on the roll. You can cut it off if you want. And then I am going to start to wrap, covering the tape. And because this is satin, I want to make sure I'm pulling it nice and tight so that there's no wrinkles. And I'm just using my thumb and my finger to guide the ribbon. So once you've got all of your tape covered, I'm going to stop and I'm going to use my fabric scissors. Once I have my ribbon wrap on there, I'm going to take a couple of straight pins. And you could use glue, but I find the straight pins are easier. And what I'm going to do is I'm going to take this tail. I'm just going to fold it right under itself so that there's a little fold. And then I'm going to use my straight pin just to hold everything in place. I just use two. You can use three or as many as you want. So you can see now my ribbon is held together with these pins. And then my last step is to trim the stems of my bouquet. And I really like to have my stems only be about an inch or an inch and a half long. I don't like long stems. And the reason that I don't like them is because what happens is when you're holding your bouquet, it forces you to hold your bouquet upright because the stems are too long. And really your bouquet looks the best when it's tilted a little bit forward. So I want to trim off most of this bottom, these bottom stems. So once your bouquet is nice and straight, the last thing you're going to do is take your bouquet vase of water, dump that out, refill it with just a little bit of water so that just the stems are in the water. So that your ribbon is not getting wet, just the bottom of the stems are in water to keep your bouquet hydrated. So now you know all the tips that I use to create a wedding bouquet. You can use these tips too to create a beautiful professional looking bouquet for your special day. If you thought this video was helpful, be sure to hit the like button and maybe share it with a flower friend that could use these tips as well. And if you want more videos like this one, be sure to subscribe to my channel. And if you're really one of my flower nerds, subscribe to my free weekly newsletter. The link is in the description.