DIY Wedding: Bridal Bouquet

Good Day Everyone,

As much as my hubby and I wanted the ‘perfect’ wedding day we didn't want to spend the best part of £20,000 on just one day of our life. So, in order to save costs I made my own bridal bouquet the evening before the wedding.  

Saving money wasn’t the only reason we did our own flowers, I absolutely love colour and really wanted to have a go at doing my own flowers because working with such pretty, colourful things makes me really really happy! Now, the sensible voice inside me would say to you that if you ever intend on doing your own wedding flowers (or make up etc) then you must practice beforehand! And that is indeed the advice I would give to others. But how often do we take our own advice? Not very often, let me tell you. So no, I didn't practice making my own bridal bouquet or table flowers beforehand. In fact, we didn't even know which flowers we were going to use for the table flowers until we went out and bought them the day before the wedding!

From my previous wedding post (read here) you’ll know that I wanted a bridal bouquet of pink roses with a few white ones. I had originally planned to buy the flowers from Marks and Spencers online and turn them into my own bouquet but a week before the wedding, whilst shopping in Manchester city centre, we came across a street florist and got chatting to him. He had had the same flower stall in Manchester city centre, by St. Ann’s church,  for the past 14 years. We had a look at the types of flowers he had and agreed that we would be back a week later to purchase pink and white roses from him, as we’d much prefer to support a small local business.

The street florist stall

For all the things that I needed to make my own bridal bouquet, my best friend who has a bridal shop in Leeds, recommended a store called Country Baskets (website) which is a kind of wholesale store for floristry, bridal and party supplies. You have to become a member in order to shop there but membership is free and open to the public and the prices are very good. This store was amazing! I was like a child in a sweet shop! Somebody like me, who likes to make colourful, pretty things could sooo easily get carried away in there that I had to force myself to go in with a list of things to buy and stick to the list.

The morning before the wedding we were at the flower stall in Manchester where we purchased 3 bunches of white roses and 6 bunches of pink roses giving us 15 white roses and 30 pink. We knew that if we ran out we could always pop back the next morning as the wedding was in the afternoon.

What I used to make the bridal bouquet:

·         Flowers – I used 25 pink and 11 white roses

·         Ribbon - I bought ivory organza ribbon with gold glitter

·         Steel scissors

·         Green cloth tape

·         Diamante pins

·         Pearl headed pins – I used white and cream coloured ones

The pink & white roses we used

Tools needed to make the bouquet

Before I get into how I made my bridal bouquet, a couple of tips for storing flowers. As soon as we got the flowers back to our hotel we put them in a bucket of warm (not cold) tap water and kept them outside (not inside) in order to keep them in optimal condition. We purposefully booked a hotel room with an outdoor area for this reason. We left the flowers sat in water for most of the day so that they were well hydrated and I started to make my bridal bouquet in the evening.

How I made the bridal bouquet:

1.       I carefully stripped the thorns and leaves off the rose stems.

2.        I picked the most perfect pink rose as my central rose and I then took 6 white roses (the white roses were smaller than the pink) and arranged them around the central pink rose but just marginally lower height wise to create a kind of dome effect.

3.       Using the green tape I taped the seven roses together towards the top of the stems. If you tape them too low down, the stems become floppy and it’s difficult to build the next circle of roses around them.

4.        Next, I arranged a circle of pink roses around the tied bouquet, again just a little lower in height to maintain the dome effect and taped them together. I stopped at this stage, admired my own work, and felt happy with the bouquet. I showed it to my hubby whose first response was, ‘Isn't it a bit small?’ but I’m a small person and I didn’t want it to look too big for me. Just then my friend came over who concurred with my hubby and so she helped me build another circle of pink roses around the bouquet.

5.       After this second circle of pink roses we reviewed our work and all three of us came to the consensus that the bouquet now looked too pink and so we added five white roses, intermittently, within the two outer circles of pink roses and voila we were happy with the result.

6.       Having made sure all the stems were taped together tightly, we then proceeded to cut the stems down (at a slight angle) to achieve the length that I wanted.

7.        Next we wrapped the beautiful organza ribbon starting from near the bottom of the stems, leaving a little bit of the green stems showing. We secured the ribbon in place using a couple of pins – inserting them at a slight angle instead of straight on

8.       We wrapped the ribbon up towards the top off the stems and then worked it back down thus wrapping the stems twice as the ribbon was quite sheer.

9.       When we got the ribbon back down towards the bottom of the stems we cut it at an angle and folded the edge under itself and secured it with the pins so that there would be no fraying.

10.   We then left the bridal bouquet in some warm tap water outside overnight.

Storing the bouquet outside over night

The next morning I inserted a few diamante pins in the centre of some of the roses for a bit of extra sparkle and voila I had made my own bridal bouquet with a little help from my hubby and friend :o) All for the fraction of the price a professional florist would charge and had a lot of fun making it :o)

The finished bouquet

A close up

The finished bouquet

What do you think of our efforts? Have you ever made your own bridal bouquet? Would you be brave enough?

Love Sheen xxx

DIY Wedding: The Colour Of Love

Good Day Everyone,

2013 has been a great year for weddings in our social circles. Where we typically go back home to England twice a year, this year we will go three times, due to friends getting married and even then there will be two weddings that we will miss unfortunately :o(

So in honour of these weddings I've decided to do a few wedding posts, drawing upon my personal experience, for inspiration. Now, we all know that weddings can be an expensive business. Just a quick search on Google for the average wedding cost, in the UK in 2013, came back with figures in the region of £18,000-£22,000. Whilst your wedding day will be one of THE most precious days of your life, that, is an awful lot of money to spend on one day (I think). Every bride, myself included, dreams of the perfect wedding day but many of us, again including myself, will inevitably have to make some compromises unless we've recently won the lottery or come from a wealthy background – neither of which was the case for me!

Deciding what to compromise on can require some serious thought and consideration from both the bride and groom. My hubby and I discussed beforehand what we definitely wanted at our wedding, what we could do without and what we could do ourselves... with a little help from our friends :o) And we did a fair bit ourselves! As you know I absolutely LOVE colour and was really excited about doing the fun, colourful bits myself. Things that we did ourselves included bridal bouquet, table flowers, makeup, nails, hair, decorations and favours. We wrote our own place cards and even dressed the wedding chairs the night before with help from a friend (more on these in future blog posts). If I’d  had my own way, I’d have probably made my own wedding cake too (but my hubby put his foot down at that)!

Coming back to this blog post and the ‘colour of love’. There was no doubt in my mind that my bridal bouquet was going to be a bouquet of roses – the ultimate flower of ‘love’ (in my opinion) but what I did deliberate was the colour of the roses. If you ask people which rose colour symbolises love then most will say the ‘red’ rose. However, we all interpret colours and what they mean and how they make us feel in a very personal and subjective manner.

(source)

For me, whilst the classic red rose does hold some romantic notion, on a subjective level, the colour red represents intensity, passion, desire, lust and danger as well as romance but it has a kind of 'obvious' and a bit 'in your face' ness about it, if you get what I mean. Also because I believe passion, desire and love of a real intense nature cannot be sustained over a long period of time, the red rose has a kind of transient and temporary notion that didn't sit too well with me. I wanted something more 'longer term', if that makes any sense?

(source)

I wanted a colour that conveyed longevity, a love of a less intense but more sustainable notion, something that encapsulated the ups and downs, the highs and lows and all the challenges and obstacles my hubby and I had overcome, something that celebrated the fact that we were still together after everything that we had been through, a colour that represented just how fragile, precious and delicate love can be but also how sincere, pure and true it can be. And so my bridal bouquet was a gorgeous shade of 'pink' – a more delicate and 'subtle' colour of love, with a few white roses to represent the sincerity and pureness of love.

Now reading this, you may think, ‘what on Earth is she going on about? Roses are roses and you just pick the colour you like or what goes with your wedding dress’ but like I said the emotions and associations colours conjure up for each of us are very subjective and this is just how I felt and what my mind thought... although I must admit there are times when my mind thinks a little too much, perhaps ;o)

If on the other hand you ‘get’ what I am going on about then great... it means there’s someone out there who thinks a bit like me when it comes to colour :o) In which case, do let me know who you are in the comments below and keep an eye out for more wedding related posts :o)

Love Sheen xxx

Garden Joy

 Good Day Everyone,

How a-mazing has the weather been lately in England?! I cannot remember the last time we had such a great summer, although I’m sure we (well not me as I’m now back in sunny Singapore but you get what I mean) will pay the price with an  equally bad winter, but for now lets enjoy and reminisce about how fantastically sunny and hot August was :o)

When I was younger I was never an out doorsy person or even a garden person. The bugs and creepy crawlies were enough of a deterrent to keep me tucked away safely indoors. I never had pets as a child as I struggle with anything that moves and I can only just about cope with fellow human beings ;o) I’m not quite sure what it is that scares me of other living / moving things but I just don’t like the idea of something pouncing / crawling on me when I least expect it. I think it might be a combination of my nervous disposition and over active imagination which results in me having a tendency to freak myself out!!!


However, over the last few years I’ve experienced, first hand, the satisfaction and pleasure gained from growing and then hand picking your own produce. In fact, one of the first gifts my hubby (then boyfriend) gave me was a beautiful plant pot with coriander and rocket growing in it. My mum has always grown some sort of herbs and vegetables for as long as I can remember, as well as her own flowers. When my hubby and I renovated our last house we had a small garden in which we grew our own potatoes, tomatoes, peas and strawberries as well as an array of herbs. Oh, the joy of picking tomatoes fresh of the vine and basil leaves straight from our garden to create our own salad was incredibly immense – I loved it!!! 

Spinach and garlic

Fresh coriander

A turnip poking through the soil

Being back home in England last week allowed me to spend some precious time with my mum in her garden. She’s been growing her own organic spinach, garlic, potatoes, turnips, rocket  and coriander in a makeshift vegetable patch. It was amazing to prepare fresh salads with spinach, rocket and coriander freshly picked from the garden :o)

My parents also planted several fruit trees this year and the cherry tree even managed a few cherries :o) Around one of the edges of my parent’s garden there are some wild blackberry bushes where local children come to pick their own blackberries. Whilst very sour, the blackberries make a great fruit crumble mixed with some green apples and honey.



My parent’s garden also has a few beautiful rose plants including a peach and red rose. The roses are amazingly fragrant and my mum tends to keep a vase of them in the living room as well as her bedroom as natural potpourri. In addition to the roses, she has a beautiful purple hydrangea bush, as well a lavender bush - oh, I can just smell it now, it's so relaxing :o)

There is large old tree in my parent’s garden where birds often nest and my hubby actually bought some bird feeders from the garden centre we went to the week before (click here to read that post) that he hung from the tree for the birds. I only wish I was going to be home long enough to watch the birds feeding from the heart shaped feeder.

 

The garden is an absolute feast for the eyes and I loved spending time in it with my mum, taking in all the different colours, fragrances and marvelling in nature’s beauty. It really does have a very calming effect on one’s mind and kind of helps you to take a break from the hectic pace of modern life and appreciate the things in life that we so often dismiss and ignore so easily.

What do you most enjoy about your garden? Do you grown your own flowers or herbs, fruit or vegetables? Do you get the same pleasure of handpicking fresh produce from your own garden as we do?

Love Sheen xxx