Corsages + Boutonnieres

Dear Shayne,

Are you sick of seeing my wedding flowers yet? Too bad -- I also made the corsages and boutonnieres, so I'm showing them to you. Right now.

All of the ladies wanted wrist corsages, so I used a sheer white ribbon to tie them on, but I took these photos before I attached the ribbon. It got frayed after a hard night's use, but I preferred the look to elastic, which I originally tried.

This one was for my grandmother:


It's hard to tell from this photo, but it's pretty big. Probably 4 inches across. She is a lady with lots of style, so I wanted her to have something really bold. The center is made of buttons -- the large red one is a hand-crafted button that has a lot of texture. The rest of the "petals" are made using the burned organza technique (same as the "poppies" in my bouquet).

This one was for my mom:


I loved this one. The main part (not counting the flyaway fluff parts) was about 3 inches across. It was very fluffy and festive -- that center red button is very sparkly. Just like my mom!

This one was for Bill's mom:


Good lord, did this one take me far too long to make. I used this awesome tutorial (which would make CUTE flowers out of cotton fabric -- gotta try that sometime) from Portobellopixie, but I made the mistake of using a slippery fabric, which was an absolute struggle to wrangle. I think this flower alone ended up taking me 3+ hours to make! Yikes! But I was really happy with it in the end, so I'm glad I stuck with it.

What I really like about these corsages is that the ladies can cut away the ribbon after the wedding, glue a pin to the back, and have a cute broach that they can wear forever. I tried my best to make flowers in styles that I thought each of them would really like. I hope I succeeded.

For the boutonnieres, I let Bill pick from all of the flower styles that I had made for the bouquet. He chose the roses:


I used hockey tape to tape the bud for these, but then they looked like tampons (Ha!) so I embellished with the striped ribbon -- I just wrapped it around the stem and then left the tail as a sort of "leaf." It ended up giving some extra pizazz, so I'm glad for that "happy accident."

All right. Sick of flowers? Good. I've got more stuff to show you anyway.

love,
kelly