After getting married and having kids, one starts to forget about many different things from their wedding day. The table decorations start to fade. What your meals were. The music being played. I don’t think that I could ever forget the process of making my handmade brooch bouquet. I have always been a unique individual that liked to think outside the box. I kept seeing these pop up on Etsy during my inspiration phase of planning and I was not ready to spend like $500 for a bouquet. I think I would have been more likely to spend that much if I could pick or add personal pieces to the finished bouquet.
This bouquet has so many different personal items that make it even more beautiful than it already is. It has shoe clips from my great grandmother. Pins from my mormor and antique pieces that I found at our local antique store. I spent so much time at our antique store that they were almost just as invested in my bouquet as I was.
Materials
Foam ball – will be cutting in half
Dowel – cut to have extra 1.5 inches to go inside foam ball
Hot Glue Gun
Silver Spray paint – Can be gold if doing gold theme
Fabric of choice for the handle and under bouquet
Burlap – if your wedding used as an accent like mine
Brooches
Crystal Beads as filler
When searching for your brooches, you can try to get the “Some old, something new, something borrowed, something blue” worked into the bouquet. You could get some old pieces to add and sneak a blue brooch in there somewhere.
First I spray painted the foam ball. This will block out the background since the brooches are not going to cover every little space. I tried putting some brooches in and then realized that I needed to cut the foam ball in half otherwise it would look odd.
Then I gouged out a little hole underneath for the dowel to fit in. Make the hole really small so that the dowel has to be shimmied into it. I then hot glued the living S out of it to make it stay. This thing will end up being really heavy and you want support.
To get the brooches/pins to stay, I would cut a long piece of wire and wrap around the back of the pin, either on the pin itself or along the little pokey bracket on the back. I tried to treat the wire kind of like a twist-tie where I would loop it around and them twist the ends together really tight. There was really no set process for this. I would leave a 2″ long piece of wire that I would push into the foam ball and then I would use more wire to hold the brooch in place.
This step really did take a lot of trial and error and probably took the majority of my time. Some brooches look better next to others or it didn’t fit where you wanted to put it. I will say, unless you have lots of time and patience to make one of these, I would maybe have somebody else make it for you.
Once I got all 100+ brooches in, I then needed to start super gluing or hot gluing the brooches together to keep it even more stable.
You can see from mine that I have a lot of hanging pieces. This really adds to the antique feel. It looked a little fake and just like something was missing before I start adding the dangling pieces.
If I had any really open spaces, I would hot glue some crystal beads into those open spots. These did seem to have a bit of an issue staying in place because if a brooch shifted it would push the bead off and it would fall off. I know that seems like the end of the world on your wedding day, but trust me, you will be worrying about so many other things that you will quickly forget about later on.
The fabric that goes underneath is meant to look messy and this fabric was some extra satin that I had from another project.
This whole process took months of going to antique shops, Ebay(cheap ones from China), and Etsy (real antique ones) to find the brooches and pins.
It has really held up well, and she currently sits in a super heavy glass bottle on a book shelf by our front door. I don’t think I could ever pack something like this away especially since it has so many pieces with meaning.
Some photos are from my wedding photographer @jumpingbeanphotography
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