A quick, simple, and inexpensive DIY project for you or your bridesmaids’ florals is to create single-stem flowers to use in place of bouquets, or fashioning a simple ribbon wrap to cluster informal bunches of flowers for a more casual wedding.
Single-stem and bunch bouquets, by virtue of being easy to create, are also great budget-friendly choices, as there is very little labor involved. The ultra-detailed Biedermeier bouquet, which can take hours and hundreds of tiny flowers to affix in painstaking concentric circles, using both glue and pins. With this style of bouquet, you have just three easy steps.
Your bouquet choice always coordinates with the formality of your wedding and the design of your dress, so these styles offer the simplest class of effort for both formal and informal weddings. For instance, a single-stemmed calla lily works for a formal wedding while a single-stemmed Gerber daisy suits an informal wedding. Your choice of ribbon must also work with the style and formality of your day, so look at lovely satin ribbon, some containing tiny pearl edges, for your more formal event, lace ribbon for your romantic Victorian garden wedding, or bright satin ribbon to match the color of daisy for your casual backyard wedding. In the informal realm, brides are choosing striped ribbon, plaids, and even ribbons with funky circles or color blocks to add a punch of creativity to their self-made designs.
The type of ribbon you use to create your single-stem or bunch bows and ties can also be used as coordinating d©cor for other parts of your wedding day, such as fabric placeholder in your guestbook or the ribbon you use in your DIY favors, and even the ribbon you use for your flower girls’ hair.
1. Using Single-Stem Roses
€ Choose a rose with a head that’s about to bloom for best appearance on your wedding day.
€ Choose a rose with a straight stem, strip it of leaves and thorns, and cut the stem to a length of 12 to 14 inches.
€ Ribbons wrap either the entire stem or simply tie a bow. Store your ribbon-bow-only single-stem flowers in a vase of water until it’s time to walk down the aisle.
2. Using Single-Stem Callas
€ Gather the stems, perhaps moving the green leaves to the top of the collection, nearest the blooms.
€ Wrap the stem and leaves in place with floral tape all the way down the stem.
€ Wrap the entire stem with satin ribbon to give the flower enough sturdiness, or skip the tape and ribbon wrap and just tie a satin bow around the top third of the stem for decoration
3. Using Single-Stem Daisies
€ Carefully remove the plastic brace set just below the flower’s head for support during shipping just before it’s time to walk down the aisle, but leave it on as you wrap the stem.
€ Daisy stems should be wrapped tightly with floral tape to give it extra strength, then covered with a ribbon wrap and tied with a ribbon bow.
€ If you cut the stems to a six-to eight-inch length, you can wrap them with lace instead of ribbon.
4. Using Bunches
€ Gather your chosen wild-flowers, tulips, peonies, daisies, or other flowers and begin assembling your chosen arrangement of blooms.
€ Begin with larger flowers in the center; then build in circles around the outside.
€ Wrap the entire collection of stems with floral tape, cut across the bottom for a uniform cut level, and then wrap the entire stem collection with ribbon or lace in spiral fashion, going once down and then up to tie in a bow at the top.
