A Vintage Style Fabric & Brooch Bridal Bouquet!

I come from a very large family....so it's not unusual for a family wedding to take place now and then. However, one of my very best friends who also happens to be my sister in law, asked me to help her make a bridal bouquet for her eldest daughter's impending wedding. Now I have been asked to make many things in my time but never a bridal bouquet before and was not sure if my creative talents could stretch that far! 

She went onto explain that this was not to be any ordinary bouquet with real flowers....oh no siree. This is one made with fabric and brooches, etc. 

I was promptly sent links to all sorts of websites in order to give me an idea of what they looked like. I was gobsmacked....as I had never seen or heard of these type of bouquets before. What a fantastic idea though....particularly as my niece suffers HUGELY from hay fever every year! In preparation and for inspiration, I sat through several very useful "how to make" fabric flowers and vintage brooch bouquet videos on YouTube...isn't it amazing the sheer volume of information out there on the internet!?
 

Then yesterday was to be our CREATING OF THE  BOUQUET DAY! We had no idea how this was going to turn out...

Sister in law arrived armed with an array of ready made fabric flowers, crocheted flowers, purchased brooches, bits of "Great Grandma's antique necklace", all sorts of embellishments, wire and her old Laura Ashley wedding dress from the early 1980s. All I had to do was provide the scissors, pliers and music while we worked...and so we began.

We spent ages wiring up all the fabric flowers......it was more difficult than anticipated as we needed to poke the wire discreetly up through each flower and back down again, then twist them together to provide a long stem. Some flowers we embellished with an occasional glass bead from Great Grandma's necklace via the wire....just to add an extra sparkle. 

Wiring the brooches was a little challenging too...until we got the hang of snipping off the back pins and using up to four wires on each in order to get it to balance and hang firmly. 

Yours truly volunteered to carefully unpick a run of lace from the old wedding dress...blimey it took ages, but I got it off in the end. 

Whilst I was unpicking lace, sister in law began to experiment with the now wired up flowers, seeing which flowers and brooches looked best next to each other - is harder than you think and in the end, we discarded one or two flowers/brooches that just didn't look right.

 It was trial and error....

Then finally...after almost three hours of continual creating, between us we managed to fix the flowers, brooches etc. together, all tightly bound in place as we didn't want anything falling off on the big day!  As we had run out of time to sew the wedding dress lace around the handle, it was decided to do that another day.  Meanwhile, the niece was waiting rather nervously back home for news of her little posy......we decided that perhaps we ought to email a photo or two up to her but were rather apprehensive. Hmm....what if she hated it....?

So, just for the photo,  the strip of lace from sister in law's old wedding dress was temporarily wrapped round the wires....and one or two photos emailed off to my lovely niece. A few anxious minutes later....we had the verdict....

SHE LOVED IT....YAY.  WAS JUST WHAT SHE WANTED!!!

Must say, we were rather chuffed but don't think we will give up our day jobs just yet...haha!

Celia