Hand-Tied Bridal Bouquet Tutorial for Beginners | Spring Wedding Flowers

Attention DIY brides! Today I'm going to show you how to make a hand-tied bride bouquet. Hi, my name is Katherine Bergman. I'm a florist with over 30 years experience designing weddings and events. Welcome to my channel where I share professional tips and techniques on how to create fabulous arrangements and bouquets that you can do at home. Today we are going to learn how to make a hand-tied wedding bouquet in this beautiful romantic garden style that's so in vogue. Are you ready to make something fabulous together? Let's get started. So I thought it was time for another DIY bridal bouquet tutorial using beautiful spring flowers and that's what we have in front of us. I thought I would show you how to do instead of like a tighter more clustered bouquet a very natural airy and light bridal bouquet that's very much in vogue. Now for those of you who've been watching me for a while, every time I do a hand-tied bouquet I always tell you to get your mise en place in place. What's mise en place? Just a fancy culinary term for dicing your onions and slicing your mushrooms and getting all that all prepped, your ingredients prepped. And so we do the same with flowers. So figure out what you're going to be using and I'm going to show you what we're going to be using. What I usually do is lay it all out on the table in front of me so that I could just grab each stem easily and make sure all the leaves, any petals that are not perfect are trimmed and removed so that you can incorporate it into your hand-tied bouquet easily without having to stop to clean your flowers. So the first thing we have here, I love heather. It grows on the hillsides of Marin County in the San Francisco Bay Area at this time of year. It's not too heavily scented. There's a mild scent. So this is heather. That's going to be one of our main accent kind of flowers. The second ingredient I'm going to show you is this very pretty pale pink belladonna delphinium. And then for some of our main flowers we have white roses. The white roses we're using today are called Playa Blanca and the Playa Blanca rose is fabulous. It lasts a really long time. It opens nicely. And if you can see there's sort of like a quarter center, kind of like an old-fashioned rose. Now I've stripped all the leaves off of the Playa Blanca as well as thorns. I'm going to cut it a little shorter because I already know that that's going to be a little bit long for our hand-tied bouquet. I'm going to lay that out here and then we have some anemones, white anemones with a dark center. So pretty. I think I have four stems of anemones here that I'm going to lie right here. And I see there's like some outer petals of the roses that are not perfect. I'm just going to pull off right now. That's the thing with white roses, right? And every little imperfection shows. And this is why Playa Blanca is a fabulous rose. It generally doesn't bruise as much as other white roses. Some white roses have that tissue-y quality to them and like you touch it and it starts browning. Then we have an assortment of sorbet-colored beautiful ranunculus. We have pinks and salmon and apricot, just a gradation of colors, which I love. And that's one of the charm, most charming things about ranunculus is how it's got sort of a luminous quality to it. Within each flower, there's gradations of color. And this is all one bunch of ranunculus I purchased at the flower market. And look at all the different colors you get from a dark salmon to pink to some apricot, orange. And that's what we have for the ranunculus. Then we have some pink snapdragons, which I thought would be a nice texture within our bouquet. Also, I'm going to cut these a little shorter. You see, I've removed the foliage from all the elements that we're going to be using, right? Because you're not going to want any foliage on the bottom of your bouquet. It makes it messy and, you know, just not done. Then for a little bit of wispiness, we have this pale pink lisianthus with the buds we're going to add in. And then one last accent flower, which is the white orlea. Beautiful. Kind of like a cross between scabiosa and Queen Anne's lace. And that's what we're going to be using. Now, I like to bind my hand-tied bouquets with tape. This is just stem tape. But the special thing about it is it comes in a roll like this. The special thing about this stem tape is it's one inch wide. Most stem tape we use are half inch wide for boutonnieres and corsages. All this is is kind of a sticky waxed paper tape. It's like a papery tape that stretches and has a waxy residue on it so it sticks to itself. And this is what we primarily use for corsages and boutonnieres, but usually we buy the half inch for corsages and boutonnieres. I like to have some one inch around for hand-tied bouquets. I like it better than wire because it gives you a nice clean wrap and is sort of stretchy. And when you do your ribbon wrap, it already helps you create a smoother finish on the handle of your bouquet. So these are some of the tips. So I even cut a length of this so that's ready for me to use right here so that I don't have to stop and, you know, with one hand try to pull up tape and things like that. So I'm going to start with our focal flower, which is kind of the roses and the ranunculus. I'm going to create sort of a core in the middle of the bouquet. Now that core is going to shift and move as you add flowers in, but it's just always nice to have like a core. Then I'm going to add some accent flowers in the middle so that core is not so tight, okay? Because we're doing a wildflower style bouquet, which I think is going to be very pretty and very in vogue and works really well with these soft, natural colors, okay? And just keep adding in elements. Now, there are people who are really skilled at spiraling their bouquets and I'm not one of those people and I don't think it matters, but you are supposed to technically layer everything in, turn, layer another piece in, turn the bouquet, and layer another piece in for spiral bouquet. It doesn't really matter. I've made thousands and thousands of bridal bouquets in my 30 years career as a florist and nobody's ever checked to see if my bouquets are spiraled perfectly, right? So don't be too fixated on that. So just kind of layer in your materials and kind of see how, you know, the way I see the bouquet is sort of in little sections, like trios of flowers. You want to see that the flower next to each flower plays well. Does that make sense? Like I like this cluster of colors right here and here. So there's like little elements within a bouquet, how you kind of compose it and how you juxtapose each flower next to each other makes a little bit of a difference, I think. That makes sense, right? You don't just add everything in at once regardless of the color and things like that. Okay, we have the anemone here, right? I'm trying to think if it's time to layer in a snapdragon. Sure, why not? Snapdragon here, maybe another white rose right here. Pull up our anemones a little bit so that we can see it, right? This little belladonna is just adorable. Sort of a new material that I haven't seen before. It's been popular the last couple of years, I'd say. But usually belladonna is in blue or dark blue or lavender. I haven't seen this pink variety. It's almost like a cross between a larkspur and a delphinium. I mean, delphiniums are in the family, but this is sort of a new material. And I love the heather as an accent flower, because you see how it's feathery and gives it movement and that more gathered look, like you pick this from a garden. And sometimes I'll see, you know, the two roses are next to each other and it looks a little bit tight. So I'll just go in and add something in between the two roses, like a lisianthus with the bud, right? Finding my little spiky short pieces of heather to add in. Now, heather always reminds me of Wuthering Heights. I'm a big English literature nerd. I've read all of Jane Austen, The Bronte Sister. I've read all of Thackeray. I have also read all of a more obscure author, Anthony Trollope, actually one of my favorite Victorian authors who's very, very prolific. Anyway, so heather always reminds me of Wuthering Heights. I picture the foggy English moorlands, the English moors with Kathy and Heathcliff. Very romantic too, right? For a bridal bouquet. Although that, that love story doesn't really end well. Adding in some more anemone. I'm adding it a little high so that we could see the pretty crown of greenery around the throat. And I'm just adding things in as I think, you know, as I, as I see, I think we need a little bit of lighter apricot here. Maybe another pink, pink snapdragon. Sometimes you have to pull things up a little bit as you're adding it in because they've shifted or you've added other things that make it go down. That kind of squished it. And I'll go back and add things into the center of the bouquet if I think it needs it. Last piece of heather in here. Generally, I'm adding the heather towards the outside of the bouquet to give it more movement around the perimeter, but definitely have some in the middle to give it continuity as well. So there are no rules. You just kind of create it as you see how, you know, just whatever you like, whatever looks pretty to you. Add some of the Orlea. I grow Orlea from seed every year. You just have to buy the seeds one time because they will reward you with lots of seeds like in August, September, and you could just collect them and plant them again next year. I have to say my Orlea is not as long stemmed and perfect as these though. I'm always trying to find accent flowers that are easy to grow because I have an extensive rose garden. So we have a lot of beautiful roses all the time, but then I don't have a lot of accent flowers. So sometimes I'll go to flower market and just buy accent flowers to accompany my roses. So I've been very interested in growing, you know, flowers that look like Orlea, Queen Anne's Lace. I've grown Queen Anne's Lace. It's pretty good, but it's not, it's not like as prolific. So if you cut it, it's just kind of done. So maybe I should do secession sewing of Queen Anne's Lace. Those of you who are very experienced at growing annual like Queen Anne's Lace and Orlea, leave me a comment to let me know what are the tricks and tips and what are some good things that you grow in your garden that's kind of cut and come and reliable because I'm happy to try new things. No, I don't think we need the stem of the snapdragon. It's kind of stiff too and hard to add in. Okay, I think I'll add another anemone here in the center of the bouquet. I think we're almost done. What do you think? It's nice to have layers. Some flowers sunk a little deeper in the bouquet and some riding higher in the bouquet. Okay, I think we're mostly done adding things into the bouquet. I'm just kind of pulling things up and making sure everything shows. I think that's pretty nice. I don't think we need these last two pieces of ranunculus, a little piece of heather. Okay, so now I'm going to finish the bouquet by tying it off using my tape and I think the tape is more forgiving too than wire. Wire is just harder so like I'm not binding it super tight because I want this bouquet to not be like so squished together, right? So I'm like I'm just tying it off but not super super tight and I'm not going to go all the way down because I figure the style this bouquet kind of lends itself to natural stems showing so you don't have to bind it all the way down. If you're doing a more tailored, formal looking bouquet then I would say bind it all the way down and that way you would do your ribbon wrap all the way down. This I'm going to let some natural stems show. Just kind of cut the stems as evenly as you can. There's going to be there's a few that's a little shorter but it visually looks pretty clean and good and now we're ready for the ribbon wrap. I chose this pinky mauve ribbon because I thought it just very pretty with the rest of the bouquet and we're just going to wrap the handle and I go down then I go up do it like a double wrap so that it's a smoother look and it doesn't it covers your tape. This ribbon is very very thick so you don't have that problem but sometimes if your ribbon is not as thick then you want some extra layers so that you don't see the tape. You know they used to sell this tape in white, the one inch tape in white. Since COVID I haven't been able to find it. There's been like some supply chain disruptions. Now to secure the ribbon I'm using half inch half inch think about half inch short pearl head pins. This is really great for securing ribbon because you don't want to use longer pins. I could stick out the other side of the bouquet and poke your bride's hand right so this is great for securing tape or not tape securing the ribbon and I've used this on thousands of bouquets. We've never had it become a problem. We've never had the ribbon unravel so definitely get some of this and I do think they sell this on Amazon. It's like the little boutonniere pins except it's much shorter it's a half inch half inch pin instead of the one inch. Okay and here we have our bouquet. So we're all done. Beautiful romantic garden style bouquet. Looks like you gather the flowers from your beautiful English garden right? Not too difficult but looks very high-end and very expensive and very on trend with the more natural garden style weddings we're seeing these days. So there you have it. Now you know how to make a hand-tied bridal bouquet. I hope I've inspired you to make something fabulous or maybe even take on the flowers for your own wedding. I've actually got a lot of videos for that. If you enjoy this video please like and subscribe and join me here again. New creations and designs are always on the way so click the little bell to be notified when I put out a new video. I love hearing from my loyal viewers and new viewers each week so send me a comment and let me know what you're up to. Please don't forget to share your beautiful floral creations in the community section of my channel. Remember flowers are nature's little luxury. Treat yourself this week and I will see you in my next video.