Making a Hydrangea and Rose bouquet

So, when I did my wedding flowers the idea of this little blog had not even popped into my head. I never took pictures of the step by step process of how I made my bouquets. Lucky for me, my awesome friend Kellsie allowed me to do her wedding flowers and I made sure to get step by step pictures of making her bouquet with hydrangea and roses, and her bridesmaids bouquets with roses and italian ruskus. Both of these bouquets are so easy to make it seems silly to pay a florist hundreds or even thousands of dollars to make them! Get your girls together and have them all pitch in and help make your wedding flower dreams come true! Making these bouquets takes two people. One person to build the bouquet and then one person to help tie it off.

Our bucket of Eskimo White Roses.

A bucket of white Hydrangea from Whole Foods.

Step One

Step One

I wanted this bouquet to be bold and solid white, so I started by cutting all of the leaves off of the Hydrangea. Make sure you always use special flower cutting scissors or pruners that are made for working with flowers. Some hydrangea flowers are very full and round, others are more oval shaped or more loose. When making a mixed bouquet with flowers other then Hydrangea make sure you use the looser of the flowers so you can easily mix the Roses in with the large Hydrangea flowers.

Step Two

 Start with your base flower, one with a very strong stem. I used a Hydrangea for mine, added some roses around it, then added another Hydrangea, then more roses to finish it off.

Step Three

 Don't be afraid to pull the Hydrangea apart and put Roses in the middle. You can even snip out parts of the Hydrangea to get more of a loose shape that is easier to work with then a dense round ball.

Step Four

Make sure you check how the bouquet looks from the side as well as the top. You want a nice round shape from the top and you want the flowers to be even all the way around. This picture had too much hanging down on one side so I just snipped some of the individual Hydrangea flowers out.

The top view of the bouquet, nice and round.

Step Five

 This is where your teammate comes in! Professional florists use wire or floral tape to make bouquets. I used transparent duct tape. Why you ask? Because it is easy to work with, it holds the flowers tightly, and it is cheap. Once you duct tape the flowers by the top and a few inches down you then cover the duct tape with satin ribbon and you can't even tell!

Almost finished.

Once you wrap the bouquet with ribbon, trim the ends of the flowers so they are all the same length and put it in a mason jar with just a little bit of water so it doesn't get the ribbon wet but the flowers can still drink.

Step Six

 Marry your best friend!! Kellsie was an awesome bride and she trusted me 110%! She even allowed me to make her bouquet a surprise that I gave to her when she was in her dress and ready to go! Being part of their day was so special and I will never forget it!

Thank you for reading!

Love, Anna

How to make a carnation ball

 My beautiful friend Kellsie got married on December 9th to the love of her life and they are one amazing and talented couple! I pretty much begged Kellsie to let me do her flowers for free, she just needed to order the flowers. She used bloomsbythebox.com just like I did and yet again the flowers were amazing! Her vision was to have red carnation balls on top of milk glass goblets. When she showed me pictures of the dense flower arrangements I was super intimidated and worried that I couldn't pull it off. We practiced one time with store bought carnations and that made me feel confident enough to do it for her wedding. Yes, one practice round and I knew I could pull it off...that is how easy these awesome looking arrangements are!

Oasis Floral Foam Balls

We used 6 inch diameter oasis floral foam balls from a local craft store. We soaked them in warm water for about 30 minutes before we placed them on top of the milk glass goblets. You can find these balls in several sizes and you can also find floral foam in a lot of different shapes like cone, cube, or cylinder.

Prep your flowers!

Start an assembly line and have a few people prepping the flowers. Cut the stem at a sharp angle about an inch past the base of the flower. This will have the flower about two inches higher then the ball. 

Cutting at a sharp angle.

 Always be sure to use scissors that are made for cutting flowers or pruning. Regular scissors aren't sharp enough and crush the stem of the flower, preventing it from absorbing water properly.

Always start at the top in the center.

 The best way I can describe my technique without having a video is to say that I made one row all of the way around the ball, and then made the rest of the rows in a triangle or diamond pattern so that it was completely filled in with flowers.

Keep adding flowers row by row.

Add caption

Use your fingers to make sure when you push the next flower in it doesn't mess up the other flowers petals.

Every few minutes take a step back and make sure the entire arrangement looks even.

Finished product, working on the first row of my 2nd arrangement.

All six arrangements ready to go!

 Be warned that the arrangements will be very top heavy so be sure to travel with care!

One awesome thing about these arrangements is how affordable they are! I used around 50 flowers per arrangement and depending on the size of the ball you can use a lot less. You can also do this same technique with other flowers such as roses but, carnations are the least expensive. Anyone can make these and there are so many color choices with carnations the options are endless! 

Thank you for reading, more to come!!

Love, Anna

After wedding hair!

Wild after wedding hair!!

Cupcake (lighter) and Cherrybomb mixed with conditioner!

I promised a coworker that she could do something wild to my hair after the wedding! We decided on light pink to hot pink ombré tips! I love working at a salon!!!

Brian actually likes it!

 More blog posts about flowers and such coming soon!!!

Love, Anna