DIY With Flowers: Bridal Bouquet

Welcome back to our DIY With Flowers series, where we have been showing you how to make your own homemade floral decorations and accessories. This week, we will show you how to make your own bridal bouquet, which is perfect for the big day, whether it is a spring, summer, autumn or winter occasion, and whether it is your own wedding or that of a friend, relative or loved one. With bridal bouquets coming ever more expensive and difficult to make or source, we'll show you how to make your own in a way which will look spectacular as the lucky lady walks down the aisle!

This bouquet may look intimidating, but it is actually quite simple and easy to make! You will probably already have almost all of the equipment needed, but you may need to get hold of some white ribbon or floral tape. You can find floral tape in most gardening stores or online, and it's really cheap and easy to get hold of! The equipment that you will need includes:

• Shears (scissors will do the job if you don't have shears)
• String
• Floral tape
• White ribbon (if possible, about 1.5 metres long, remember that it doesn't have to be white but that's our suggestion!)

Traditionally, most flowers in a bridal bouquet stick to the colours of white, with some splashes of pink or other pastel colours. As a result, you can see that in our example we have mostly stuck to this pattern, with white and pink being the two main colours in our bouquet. The flowers that we recommend using and have used in our example here are:

• Avalanche rose
• Statice
• Pink Limonium
• Peony
• Green trick dianthus
• Phlox
• Eucalyptus
• White lisianthus

However, as always, you should choose colours and flowers to match what you want! If you have a coloured theme to your wedding, a bouquet is a great item to match to the theme to ensure that it is coherent throughout your big day!

The first step in making any bouquet or flower arrangement is to remove all of the leaves from the stem.

Many of our professional florists at FloraQueen have a special machine which helps them with this, but you may need to do it by hand. Gently remove each leaf delicately, you don't want to damage the stem.

Do this to all of your flowers before moving onto the next step, it will save time later and mean that you can get rid of all the mess before you get started!

The first step is to choose a focal flower. This means choose a flower that you want to be the centre of attention within your bouquet. We have used a light pink peony in our example here.

You should then hold the flower with your fingers near to the blossom end, as shown here in the above image.

You should add the next flower at an angle facing towards the left like this, but it should remain so that the bloom is at the same height as that of your focal flower.

Here we have used an avalanche rose. This sets you up for the coming steps and ensures that your bouquet will be well filled and rounded.

From now on, every time you add a flower, rotate the bouquet rightward a quarter turn to position the bouquet ready for the next flower to be added diagonally, angled leftward as before.

In this case we've added some lisianthus to bring a hint of colour to your bouquet and your wedding.

Once you've go the bulk of your bouquet ready, you can insert some filler flowers between the flowers you already have. These are usually the smaller, green flowers which give a natural look to the bouquet.

One top tip is to ensure that you put all of the filler flowers in at the same angle in order to ensure that your bouquet stays symmetrical and isn't all over the place!

You're hand is probably aching from holding the flowers for all this time right? You can finally let go now, just one more step! Tie a tight knot at the highest point of the stem that you possibly can.

This will keep all of your flowers held together tightly and looking beautiful and symmetrical. Then cut off any excess string so that it can't be seen as you or the lucky lady walks down the aisle.

This step is important not just in terms of ensuring that your flowers look great, but also so that it is practical! If you or the bride will be holding the bouquet for a while, you want to make sure there is room to hold it comfortably.

We recommend that you measure two hands lengths from the string, and add an additional 3 centimetres of wiggle room to make sure that it is comfortable to hold the bouquet if the bride will be holding it for a long time.

This is where the floral tape comes in, as we wrap the stem from the top downwards. This will ensure that the flowers are firmly held in place until and on the big day.

Be careful not to wrap all the way to the bottom, but instead to wrap just over the size of one hand. This way the bouquet will keep its natural look but has plenty of floral tape to do the job of holding everything together firmly.

Adding the ribbon is one of the more complicated stages so pay attention to this step to ensure that it looks gorgeous.

In a lot of cases, ribbons will be shiny on one side and matte on the other side so we'll instruct you on how to do this with this kind of ribbon. If your ribbon is the same on both sides, don't worry, just ignore the references to shiny or matte!

First, place the shiny side of the ribbon facing the stems so that the matte side is visible. Then put one end over the top of your flowers and wrap the rest around the stems. Leave approximately 40cm spare at the end to tie a knot and add a bow.

You should now have about 40cm of ribbon left, which we'll use to tie a knot to hold it all together, and also to add the cherry to the cake that is our beautiful bouquet with a bow!

The final step is to enjoy the wedding! Whether the bouquet is for your wedding or a friend, relative or loved one's, make sure that they have a great day and enjoy showing off their bouquet to everyone. Make sure they are careful with the delicate flowers, until it comes to the throwing of the bouquet! Congratulations to the bride and groom!

We hope you've enjoyed reading and making this stunning bouquet and are now ready for the big day! If you're a guest, why not check out our wide range of wedding flowers? We hope that the wedding is a great day for everyone to enjoy!