I Made This Bridal Bouquet for a Real Wedding (Start to Finish)

This week we have a mid-week wedding that is not standard for us and I'm going to take you behind the scenes on how I create an entire wedding in one morning. So I've got all of my flowers that I'm thinking that I'm going to use and the first thing that I like to do is pull all of the flowers for the bouquets. That is the number one priority when I'm designing. So I'm going to start with the bridal bouquet and I'm going to by pulling flowers I just mean that I am taking the flowers out of the buckets that the growers brought and I'm cleaning them, preparing them for design and then putting them in appropriate vases. So this is going to be the this is a toss bouquet. Now a toss bouquet you can picture it right it's like the bouquet you toss over your shoulder. Not a lot of people do toss bouquets anymore but this bride is doing a toss bouquet. She really wanted to keep her bouquet and toss a smaller bouquet so this will be a little mini bouquet. In addition to the bride and the toss bouquet I'm going to do a single boutonniere for the groom and two centerpiece arrangements that are going to be put on top of two barrels that line the aisle of the wedding. They're getting married at Black Ankle Vineyard which is a vineyard here in Maryland and I'm excited to see the pictures because this is going to be a really colorful wedding. The bride is Mexican, her dress is like this kind of crisp white with beautiful multi-colored flowers all over it and then she's wearing a veil that has multi-colored beautiful flowers all over it too and it goes down to the floor and so right now I'm just pulling the flowers that I think I might use so in the numbers that I might use them. I'm doing five snaps for the bride, three snaps for the toss bouquet and the toss bouquet is going to be small. I would call it like a nose gay or a posy, something like that. This is line flower season. We're in mid-May, there are a lot of line flowers and line flowers are one of the design elements, one of my six elements that I always try to use in design. Sometimes we have more than other times of the year but right now we have quite a few so I'm going to be using maybe some extra and I'm excited that we have this blue because we don't often have a lot of blue. I actually kind of would have liked a darker blue. I think there's a delphinium called blue diamonds which is a small like a mini delphinium but that has dark blue like a really royal blue so I'm going to pull these. I'm not sure if they're going to work but we're going to pull them anyways. The color that I really would like is something like bachelor's button blue and I actually have some bachelor's buttons so we'll see if I end up using them. If I don't end up using them that's okay too because I'll just put them in the center pieces or I'll use them for something in my shop this week but what I like to do is pull everything and have it all cleaned and ready to go so that when I'm designing I don't have to really think about cleaning or picking or anything that I can just use what I have or toss things that I'm not using. So let's next I'm going to use red ranunculus. Now red ranunculus is not something that's very common grown in the spring. A lot of our growers have said actually we've needed a lot of red this spring. We've had a couple events, a school event where the school colors were red, a different wedding where somebody wanted red. If you saw the video my red periwinkle peach wedding there's you know there's not a lot of red. So I was surprised actually that the grower had this much red this week but I'm excited because ranunculus we're coming to the end of ranunculus season and I want to use as much of it as I can. So in these bouquets ranunculus is really not a focal. I mean you can see how big they are. They're big enough to be a focal in some situations but because it's peony season peonies are going to be the focals. So let's see I've got one two three four five six I'm going to pull seven for the bride and three for the toss bouquet and so you can see cleaning just means taking off all the leaves giving them a fresh trim and getting them prepared for design because when I'm designing like I said I don't want to think about anything else I just want to design and it's actually the cleaning that takes so much time. The actual like designing doesn't take as much time. Next I'm going to be using some yellow yarrow. This is moonshine yarrow my favorite yarrow. There's a lot of yarrows. Cottage yarrow is like a peachy pink lavendery mix but I really prefer this yellow. It's much sturdier I think much sturdier and it dries great. So when I'm using it for the wedding I want to take off a lot of these side shoots and a lot of this greenery so that it's nice and clean and this is really more like a filler flower. Filler flowers again one of the six elements and it is more like giving a background color like this isn't a really showy flower it's just like something that is going to add some color to the background. So yarrow is one of my favorite filler flowers and I buy as much of it as I can when it's the season. So I'll probably do five for the bride pull five and let's see how many I need or use. Next I've got some nigella. Nigella is kind of that same light blue trim this one off just broke but I can use it for something else. I'm going to use I'm going to pull these and again I'm going to see if the blue looks right. A lot of these flowers are really easy to clean they're really they go fast. So even though I said like using I mean cleaning flowers takes the most amount of time a lot of these are pretty fast. When we get to the roses that's going to be a much slower process. Cleaning roses takes forever and we don't have roses enough. You know we we have only one rose grower and we only get roses you know for a couple months a year so we don't have any like I don't know fast tricks on cleaning roses. We just do our best. I've got campanula this week. I actually have a ton of campanula because it's been so hot here that a bunch of our growers reached out and asked if I would take extra flowers this week and I always try to do that if I can. We've had temperatures in the high 90s this week which is really not normal for this time of year. Like I said it's about mid-May and we've just gone through like weird frosts that were late in the season which killed a lot of stuff and now we're having weird heat waves. So I have a lot of campanula and when I'm looking you can see some of the stems are like this and some are like this. So when I'm using them for bouquets I'm looking for something a little more like this instead of like this. And actually we had one of our flower more members ask about campanula this week and say like what do you do with a stem like this and it is kind of weird right. I'll put it aside now and I'll show you later what I would do with it. So right now I'm going to try to pull these like skinnier stems that are a little more manageable for like a bouquet and I'm actually not gonna add any to the toss bouquet because the toss bouquet is small. I think I can get some of the pink in in some other flowers without using them. All right so I've got three in there that should be enough for now. I'll see if I need more. I can always add more. All right I'm going to pull a little bit of this viney. This is a native honeysuckle and I love it because there are not, I'm going to be clear, there are not a lot of vines that are native to our area that work for bouquets. A lot of the viney things that are available are actually invasive or foraged and I'm not using any invasives anymore in my designs. I did for a long time some knowingly some unknowingly but just the more I learn about invasives the more I don't want to use them. So I'm so excited to have this native honeysuckle and I'm going to use a bunch of this in the bouquets. Now they're coming you know kind of like this so if you're getting something like this and you're like I don't know what to do with this, I would say the goal for a bridal bouquet is to trim it down to as much of a single clean stem as you can. So taking off all the side shoots, taking off any of this dead wood, there's a lot of dead wood on this, and even if you have it in a V I sometimes would even take that off so that I can have a nice clean stem. And again taking up all this dead wood and you can always go back in and prune once you're designing but I like to try to get it to you know where I would like to use it in design. I'm also trimming off some of these little nubs because they might be weird. Okay so that's pretty good for single stem. So you can see that cleaning this kind of stuff might take a little bit longer. There's a lot of like pruning decisions when I'm like cleaning these because I'm like how do I want to use it. It's possible I might just want to use this side shoot with the with the flower on it so I could take off this full top part but I'm going to leave it for now and see. And I am going to put some in the toss bouquet. Now I'm going to pull some poppies. These orange poppies, beautiful. And I know sometimes people think poppies are not good in bouquets. I would not use these if I knew it was going to be 100 degrees but weirdly it's going to be 100 degrees today and only like 60 degrees tomorrow. So I am going to use a few of these in the bouquets. And they're already nice and clean so I don't have a lot of cleaning to do. And I'm actually gonna, let's see, I want to use ones that are open but maybe not fully open. So one like this is perfect. It's kind of just opening. That one's perfect and maybe this one. I definitely would not use poppies in anything out of water. Boutonnieres, corsages, installations, anything where the flowers are not in water I would definitely not use poppies. They wilt very quickly and will look terrible so I'm not gonna not gonna use those. All right I am going to pull a couple of these peonies, these reds. I don't know if I'm going to end up using the reds or pinks or a combination but I want to pull them anyways. And kind of when I'm pulling these the the issue is that I don't want these to get used either by my team or by myself inadvertently and then think oh I wish I had had this really great flower for the bride. I always want to pull the best flowers for the bride and set them aside so that she gets the absolute best. She is the priority. I have this little vase that I'm going to just set aside for a minute. This is going to be for the boutonnieres. So I like to pull my boutonniere flowers while I'm doing my bouquets in case there's something specific that I want to use in the boutonniere. So I definitely do want to use some of this yellow yarrow. This holds up great out of water. And then I'm going to pull a ranunculus. I don't love a ranunculus in a boutonniere. It works but I don't love it. I'm also going to pull one of these nigella. These do pretty good out of water so I'm going to pull that one. And I'm just going to set these aside for now and then think about the boutonniere once I finish the bouquets. All right now for the roses I cannot believe, I mean it's with this heat, that we have so many roses this week. And I definitely want to use them. These come from our local rose grower Florabye8. Actually on our YouTube channel we have an entire video about growing and designing with roses with Lauren. It's like a crash course in growing and designing and selling roses. So if you're interested you can check out, I'll put a link in the show notes. So let me start with this one. This is called Crazy Love and you can just see how Lauren packages these. She wraps each variety in paper so that it's easy for us to see what they are. And then I'm going to go ahead and I'm just going to use my clippers to trim off these thorns. Actually they're not thorns, they're prickles. I learned that when I was researching roses once. Everybody thinks that they're thorns but they're actually prickles. So whatever I do I don't want the bride to touch a rose and have a thorn. See there's still one down here. That would be not good. That would be very bad. So I want to just check the stems, make sure that there are no thorns. So these are pretty fragrant. There's some that are more fragrant than this but these are pretty fragrant. These are, since they're locally grown, Lauren is using varieties that are fragrant and you can see they're much shorter stems than you would get at like a wholesaler that's shipping in roses from South America. These are locally grown, very fragrant. And this variety, we haven't, this is the first time we've had this variety this year. And I'm remembering last year we used these, we gave these to Micah E. Wood who's a local musician for his album cover which was really fun. And not only was it cool just that he used them, he's a local guy who used local flowers on the cover of his record, but then like when the record came out there were billboards for the album everywhere. So Lauren and I would always be texting each other places that we saw the big billboard of the album, which was really, really cool to see her flowers through me on billboards all over downtown and on the highway. It was, it was pretty wild. So I'm just pulling, I'm gonna pull about five of these of this variety and I'm just trimming. In our flower more community, somebody was asking how to get thorns, prickles off of roses. There are other tools, there's like a plastic, looks like a pancake that you can strip and we do use that. But I'll tell you that when you're using local roses, these stems are not like super straight and super strong like you would find at a wholesaler. So sometimes I'm a little worried about using that thing because it is, you're like really like stripping and that stripping I think can break the stem sometimes. So I'm just looking through and finding the longest stemmed ones we have. So I don't think I'm going to use any roses in the toss bouquet. Roses are like our most special, besides peonies, our most special flower. So they don't need to be thrown across the room and smashed on the floor. We have some other flowers that will match the color palette but are less expensive and just less precious. These are so precious to me. And look at how cool this is. It's got like pink on the back, like orangey yellow on the front. This would be a perfect flower to do, to use for our Flower More Challenge this month. Our Flower More Challenge is to take a single flower and to really look at it, like really closely look at it, the front, the back, the sides, and then create a color palette for a design made from one flower. And this would be perfect. And actually I might even try that a little later on if I have time. Okay, so not going to pull any for that. I'm going to just tape these back up and put them back in their bucket for now. And I don't think I'm going to pull any more of these. I'm going to look at the other colors that I have and see if there's some other ones that I might pull. But right now, that's all the roses I'm going to pull. All right, I went back in the cooler, double checked. I do have some bachelor's buttons. So I'm going to pull a few of these. For real, bachelor's buttons are not my favorite flower. I love their color. And especially for a wedding like this, the color is great. But first you can see the stem is like really spindly. And it has a lot of foliage and side shoots. And it's not fast to clean because if you try to do it quickly, you could break the stem. And it's a similar reason why the growers also kind of hate them because they're really hard to harvest. It takes a long time. And for such a small flower, I mean, they do make an impact. But comparing, you know, bachelor's buttons to, I don't know, harvesting peonies or really anything else, these are really difficult to harvest. And they're annoying to clean. But they do add a nice color. Anyway, if you put them in singly, they look kind of dotted. So I'm going to put them in sort of in clusters, which maybe means I should put nine in. Maybe if I did three and three and three. I'll pull nine and see. So you can see that the bouquet colors, you can sort of see they're starting to come together. I like how they look. Put three in here. I'll need to go back and see if there's any more blue. If I only have two, I won't use them because two is like eyeballs. It's too weird. All right, next, I'm going to pull some of this Solomon's seal. This is my favorite foliage, spring or any season. And also, I feel extra proud of it because I grew it myself. It's just my favorite spring foliage. It's like the first foliage that becomes available in the spring. It's got nice stiff stems. You can see how stiff they are. They hold up great out of water. Anytime you have something that you're not sure, does it hold up out of water? Always do a test of it. You never want to use something and not have tested it and have it wilt. So I always like to just test everything. And by testing it, I just mean like leave it out of water. You can just like lay it on the table, leave it and come back to it, see how it does. You have to think for a bridal bouquet, it could be several hours that that bouquet is out of water. And even though I give our customers like good instructions on how to keep their bouquet looking fresh, you know, if you're using it for pictures, make sure you put it back in the vase of water between takes. You know, if it's hot, especially here in Maryland, especially going into the summer, it can be a scorcher and those flowers can wilt really quickly. So I'll put all these in. All right, my vases are getting nice and full. I'm almost finished. All right, this peony is called Felix and it's a great color. The thing I have to assess right now is will these be open and looking fantastic tomorrow? Because I don't want the peony, I did this for years. When I was starting out and I wasn't sure how to time the opening of peonies, a lot of my bouquets had peonies that were totally closed, which is not ideal because then it just looks like a round pink ball. That's not what I'm going for. So I really want them to be open and I can fluff them up a little bit. I actually just made a whole video about how to get peonies to open because I've spent tons of time trying to get peonies to open. So I'm just clearing off the guard petals, anything that looks a little weird or if there's any petals on the outside that are damaged. It's kind of like roses. You want to just clean up your peonies. So I think these look great. These will be open, cleaning all of the foliage off, even these tops. I don't like this top. This one's pretty closed, but I can manually open it pretty quickly. It's really soft in marshmallow stage, so that was a fast, fast open. That's what I love for weddings. I want peonies to open quickly. I don't want to have any trouble with them. Many times we've had to, you know, try all the tricks. Hot water, banging them on the table, warm water, putting them outside in the sun. We've done all of the things to try to get them to open and they never open. Or they open, but not in time for the wedding. So I just want to make sure these are nice and open. And I think I will pull a couple for the toss bouquet, but I'm gonna, I'm gonna just pull one. I know one is not something that I advocate for very much, but they're so big and I'm gonna put some other, um, well, let me put in three just to be safe. I don't want to use these for something else and then not have them available to me. So I'm just gonna manually open these. All right. So I'm just gonna assess where I am. These look good. Um, I think I'm gonna just do one more check in the cooler. See, make sure you can see one thing that I did not add. So this bride, she just said, this is what I'm wearing. Make something colorful that, you know, compliments what I'm wearing. So the dress is white, but I have not included any white in here. And right now I'm thinking that I'm not going to because white, I want this to feel really like rich and colorful and white sometimes I think washes out the color or makes it not as intense. I want this to feel like really colorful, really intense. So right now I think it's looking good. I do want to go back and just double check the cooler one more time to make sure there's nothing else that I need. All right. I found a few more bachelor's buttons. So I'm going to put one more of those in the toss bouquet. Clean that up quick. I know there's some people that probably would leave some of these side shoots on. You can do that. But for me, I worry about wilting any sort of stems that are underdeveloped or really fresh. There's risk of wilting. So, OK, I've got my bachelor's buttons. I have this beautiful yellow stock and I have some yellow in, just not sure. It's like the status and the yarrow do the same thing. They're both filler. They both work great out of water. So I could use this in the boutonnieres too. So I think I'm going to pull a couple of stems and see. If I don't use it, that's fine. And these side shoots I'm going to save for the boutonniere. These are more like a just in case stems. I'm not sure if I'm going to need them. And again, they're pretty branchy. You can see they're really branchy. This status, I mean, the stem length on this status is fantastic. We do not often see status at this stem length. And this is like 24 inches. OK, so I'm going to set these aside. Lastly, I have to make a decision about the bells of Ireland. Now, I love bells of Ireland, and I actually feel like having some spring green that complements the Solomon's seal might be nice. But I don't want this to feel overly green. So again, I'm going to pull them and then I'm going to make a decision once I'm ready to design. So these are these are huge. They have tons of side shoots. So how I'm going to break this down, I'm going to just start breaking down all of these side shoots. The really short ones I can use in centerpieces or save them for something else. But I want to get them down to a single stem like this. And then these came with the leaves on, you can see. So the bells are kind of hidden. So I need to go through and take off all of the leaves. This is definitely a time consuming process. If you're using a lot of bells of Ireland, you're going to want to clean these like in advance because it can take a long time. That's partly why the growers sell them with the leaves on because they don't want to deal with it. So you can kind of see the difference between leaves on and leaves off. Really for design, you want all of the leaves off. And it's really, I would say, like a floral design faux pas. I don't know. Is that a thing to leave the leaves on? Because what you're looking for is the bells. You want the bells, not the leaves. So I'm just trimming off all these leaves. If the grower does take the leaves off, they will often charge more per stem. So they're probably charging less per stem if the leaves are on and more per stem with the leaves off. And I asked in our flower more community recently when we had some bells, which would you rather? Would you rather pay more to have the leaves off or would you rather pay less and do the leaves yourself? Most people said they'd rather do the leaves themselves. It's more a matter of do you have time? And also, are you paying somebody? Like if I had one of my designers just cleaning bells of Ireland, that would take a long time. And I'm not sure I would want to pay them just to do that. So you have to weigh those options. Okay, so I've got some for the bridal bouquet. I'm not going to put it in the toss bouquet. All right, so I've pulled them. If I don't use them, it's fine. All right, it is time for designing. I've pulled all of my stems for my bridal bouquet. And now what I want to do is take this, all of this, and lay it out so that it's easy to see what I'm using. And I want to move quickly when I'm doing this because I don't want the flowers out of water very long. I could do, you know, some in bouquet vases. That would be a way to do that too. I'll probably do that with the poppies just because they're a little more delicate. But I want to just lay out what I have. This will make my designing, for me, faster and a little more organized. So for this bouquet, I have all of the six elements of design. I have foliage. That is my Solomon's seal and my native honeysuckle. I have my lime flowers, which are my Bells of Ireland, also my snapdragons. I have my focal flowers, which are peonies. I have my secondary focals, which are my ranunculus and my roses. It's weird to say that roses are a secondary focal or like a secondary face flower, but that's what they are in this case because the peonies are just so big. So I've got these. Then I've got my filler flower. I've got status and yarrow. So I'm going to put both out. Not sure if I'm going to use both. And oh, I forgot I've got delphinium. That is another wine flower. And I've got my campanula. That's a filler. Even though it's huge, it's still a filler. So a filler really, for me, is anything that is like a single stem, but has multiple blooms on the top of it. So campanula is still going to be a filler in this case. And then I've got my bits and pieces, which for me this time is going to be my nigella and my bachelor's buttons. All right. So quite a lot to work with. This is one of the joys of using local flowers, is that there is so much to choose from. And I want to use it all, just to be real. I made this whole training on or like a guide to how not to overstuff things. And one of the things in our community, in our flower more community that people always talk about is like, there's so much abundance at certain times of year that we all want to use everything, but we are trying to not use everything. So OK, so I'm going to start and I'm going to start with, I always start with a stiff stem. So this is a pretty good stiff stem and I'm going to use the spiral design method that is where I take, you know, here's how I start. I take my non-dominant hand and that's where I'm going to hold everything. And my dominant hand, I'm going to place things. So here is my, here's what it's going to look like every time I place. I'm always going to be holding and then placing over at this angle, sort of in an X shape. And then I'm going to turn the bouquet and I'm going to do it again. I'm going to place the next stem at an X angle. Doing hand tied bouquets in a spiral way is not easy, but the more you practice, the better you get. And you can practice just with sticks. You could just practice this method with sticks if you wanted. So I'm going to just be doing the spiral method. I'm crossing over, spinning, and I'm thinking about, I'm not thinking about color blocking for this bouquet. For a wedding I did recently, I did some color blocking and I'm not, that is not what I'm going for here. I'm looking for really mixed color. There might be a few things color blocked or paired up together. We'll see. As I'm going, if my stems seem kind of long, I can just trim those down. And what I want to show you, I was, I had a freelancer here a couple weeks ago and I was trying to show her. One thing is you don't want to do use a death grip. So death grip is like this. You see the difference? Right now I have the stems just between my thumb and my forefinger and I have a light grasp on them. So I am not holding them super tight. And I feel like this freaks people out because your shape is moving around and doing weird things and, but you really don't, at this point, don't want to hold everything too tight. So here I am using my Nigella, same way. I'm going to put a few together and I can vary the length. I can always go back and change these, but I want to put them in a few at a time. So I'm just going along and I want to make sure that my, whatever focals I have, have plenty of room because sometimes when we're like putting a lot of flowers in and our focals can get a little squished. I don't want anything to feel squished. So I'm keeping a nice loose grip. I'm letting the flowers relax, not holding them too tight. And I can be adjusting as I go. When you start to get comfortable, you can do a couple of stems at a time if you want. You can do more than one at a time. So here I just put this red in and I'm seeing that there's like a red line here and I'm not sure, see how that actually feels a little too concentrated red in that spot. So you can see that this part of the design process goes pretty quickly compared to the cleaning. Right now all I'm doing is placing my stems and that part can go kind of fast. Here's one, here's a delphinium with some side shoots. I should have cleaned these off. I don't like to clean as I'm going, just makes things a little awkward for me. And I'm using my line flowers kind of between my focals so that my eye is drawn down the bouquet into the focals. And again I'm just keeping a nice light touch, adjusting as I go. And you can always, you know, always go back and adjust later. I don't love where these bachelor's buttons are. I'm going to set those aside for now. I'm keeping my ranunculus kind of popped out a little bit because you can see there's so much going on that I don't want them to get lost. They're kind of small which is why they're the secondary focal, they're not the focal because the peonies are just so big. And I'm liking how it's coming together. If you see a spot, like here I'm thinking I think I need more yellow here in the center, you can always go in and put something through the center. But when it comes out the bottom I want to make sure that it's in line with my spiral so that my spiral gives me a lot of balance. I don't want anything to be off balance. I'm just trimming because it's getting heavy. Although I did start at a new strength training gym so I should be getting stronger and maybe having more stamina for my designing. Although I just started so maybe I'm not there yet. All right, I'm loving this so far. Just taking a look. Sometimes if I'm designing by myself I will use a mirror, have a mirror in the closet I'll pull out and I'll just have it sort of in front of me for like times like this so that I can be like, how is it going to look for somebody holding it? If I have one of my designers here I can ask them to give me some feedback but sometimes I'm not. I don't have a designer here and sometimes I'm just by myself. So in that case I will use the mirror and I want to tuck this yarrow down just a little bit more because remember the yarrow is the background and it was covering the rose which is more of a the secondary focal. I wasn't sure how I would feel about the nigella and the delphinium but I think the light blue works just fine. I think I would like it better if it was the dark blue but this blue is great. You can see here I have a rose kind of on the edge. It looks like it's drooping a little bit. I mean it's not drooping it's just the head is so heavy and I want to make sure that I have something under it to prop it up and still my hand is nice and loose. I haven't used the status. I might not use that. I definitely want to use all of the roses. I really like it. All right so oh I didn't even put in the poppies. Do I need them? I think I do. These I'm just threading through and I'm keeping them kind of high. All right now I'm just kind of looking. I see there's like two roses right here. I don't love that so I'm either going to remove one or I can just turn it so its face is turned the other way. Threading the poppies through will also help protect their stems. These stems are not strong so I don't want there to be any breakage. Okay it's looking good. I saved my viney foliage to the end so that I can kind of add this on the bottom. All right here's what I got. I'm going to trim. There's going to be so much trimming so right now I'm just trimming to get some of the weight off so it's not going to be the final. Yeah it's cute cute cute. Okay so I'm going to tape. I'm using a one inch floral tape. You could use twine or wire. Some people use other kinds of like waterproof tape. I still use this floral tape. So just rip a piece off and then I'm just going to start with having my finger right here. I'm going to twist it and I'm twisting pretty, I'm taping pretty high up because that for me feels like supportive. I don't have to tape very far down but I want to tape pretty far up. If I only tape you know one or two courses of this tape it will allow my stems to remain nice and wide so that the bouquet still feels loose. It doesn't feel too stiff and I can always go back and adjust if I need to. So there you have a local flower mid-May bridal bouquet and I'll finish it off tomorrow. For right now I'm going to just trim it one more time and stick it in a vase of water. I have pulled all my flowers for my toss bouquet and now I'm going to make make my toss bouquet. So I've already cleaned all of my stems, I've prepared everything and I'm just going to lay everything out on the table for my toss bouquet. Toss bouquets are not as popular as they used to be when I started designing weddings almost 20 years ago. Toss bouquets were definitely still very popular but they seem a little I don't know like they've they're less popular now and this bride really wants to keep her bridal bouquet so she did not want to toss it. So it makes sense to have a toss bouquet and I'm going to make you know bouquet similar to the bride's bouquet but just smaller and I'm not going to focus as much on premium stems. I do have some peonies in here but I'm not going to put as many peonies and I'm not going to put roses. I pulled one rose but I'm not going to use it. This is a much less expensive bouquet so I'm not going to put a lot of high ticket items in here. So once I have everything laid out I will start my spiral bouquet process. All right so I'm putting this rose back. Toss bouquet doesn't get the rose. So all of my bouquets I start with a stiff stem. This is my Solomon's seal and I'm going to start with that and then I'm going to go right to my snapdragon and whenever I'm doing a spiral bouquet I'm holding with my non-dominant hand and placing with my dominant hand and I'm always going to be putting things at this angle. So I'm going to be placing every stem at that at that angle and I'm keeping my hand nice and loose so again I'm not I'm not having a death grip just keeping it nice and loose and after I put the stems in I'm giving my bouquet a little turn. I am going to try the bachelor's buttons for this toss bouquet. When I'm teaching people to do the spiral technique it's important I always try to reiterate you really do have to turn the entire bouquet or you'll get a flat bouquet and sometimes people want flat bouquets I call them like a football where you have like a front and the back. That's not generally what I'm going for so you do have to turn your bouquet so that you're placing your stems so that you have this balanced this balanced bouquet. So I'm turning and once you get comfortable you can do a couple stems at once. You can see it came together pretty quickly when you have everything cleaned the design part does come together pretty fast. All right so cute little toss bouquet it's going to get thrown on the ground I'm going to just trim it up and then tape it up so I guess the idea is not that it's going to get thrown on the ground it's going to get thrown someone's going to catch it. All right so same thing I'm going to pull off a piece of this this tape now this tape is if you've never used floral tape when you feel it it's sort of sticky but it's more like tacky it doesn't get sticky until you pull it and that's when that resin inside there starts to get extra sticky. So keeping my spiral so that my flowers can really splay out I don't want anything to feel too tight. All right now you can see I've got these nice spiraled stems I'm going to give everything one more trim and then put it in a vase of water and pop it back in the cooler until I'm ready to finish it off tomorrow with ribbon and a final change of the water. So the last thing I'm going to do for my bridal bouquet is wrap it in ribbon I don't do this sooner than right at the end of designing when I'm about to go on the delivery or when somebody's going to come pick it up because water can be soaked up through the stems and it can get your ribbon like wet and gross so I leave that till the last minute. I've also left this bouquet for a little while in the cooler and I've come back to it and I'm just double checking to make sure that it looks how I want it to look and I have to say sometimes when I go back in and get it I'm like oh it needs to be tweaked or I didn't really like this but this bouquet I'm actually obsessed with. It is the perfect color palette for this wedding. The bride is wearing a Mexican inspired white gown with really colorful flowers all over it and this is going to complement her dress so beautifully and honestly if I were getting married this is the kind of bouquet I would want. It is perfectly reflective of what's going on right now in our region. These are all of the best flowers and I'm obsessed with it. So I cut my stems pretty short you can see that I've cut them just about an inch below the tape line and I do this so that I know some people like to leave their stems long. I do not. I like to cut them short because I want the bride to be able to tip the flowers forward and have all of these flowers be shown. If you have long stems you're forced to keep your bouquet up like this and if somebody's taking a picture of you straight on you're not getting the full effect of this gorgeous bouquet right. So I cut my stems short and then the last thing I'm going to do is put my ribbon on. So I just clutch my stems nice and tight make sure that everything's dry. I always like to have a towel near me so that if stems are dripping I can dry that off and then I'm going to take my this is a double faced white satin ribbon. The bride's wearing white so I wanted to include a little bit white but I didn't want to put it in the bouquet where it might dilute all of this color. I love all of this color. So I'm starting at the bottom. I'm using my finger to hold it in place and remember that tape is kind of tacky so it's going to hold the tape I mean the ribbon in place as well. So I'm just going around in a circle up the stems making sure that I totally cover all of the tape. I don't want to see any tape peeking out at the top. That's one of my pet peeves because if photographer does a close-up of this bouquet I don't want there to be any weird any weirdness. So I make my bouquets usually in the round so that no matter how a bride holds her bouquet there's no front in case she holds it backwards and then it looks bad. So but I do have a side that I like the best and where I think I want her to hold it. So I've cut the ribbon off and I'm going to fold this piece under itself just like a little like this so that it's nice and flush and then I'm going to use some pearl pins to hold that ribbon in place and these pearl pins are also going to indicate which I will tell the bride that this is the front and where you should be facing the bouquet. If your pins always put your pins in at an angle so I'm putting them in at an angle instead of straight through because if you put them straight through even if they don't pop out the back when somebody clutches that bouquet it could condense the stems and that pin could poke out and the last thing you want is for a person to get pricked by a pin that you put in their bouquet and then have a little drop of blood drip on their dress. It's like there are lots of things that I imagine could happen and that is one of them. Same with having berries in a bouquet and having a berry squish on a dress. That happened once was not my bouquet but it happened to a friend of mine. She put some berries in a bouquet and the bride one of them got squished and there was like burgundy juice all down her dress. Worst, worst, worst. So I don't want anything to affect or impact. So now I've got my bouquet wrapped. It's got just like a little handheld wrap right here. My stems are nice and short. You can see I have cut my stems even. Sometimes it doesn't work on the first try but I do like to get it so that they're all flush not only because it feels balanced and the photographer loves to take a picture like this but I always also just want it to look nice and clean and clean cut. So the last thing I'm going to do is I'm going to change the water in my vase and I'm going to put just a tiny bit of water back in so that just the stems just the bottom of these stems are in water and then this bouquet is going out the door. If you're interested in learning more about how to do wedding flowers this is something we discuss in depth in my online community Flower More. We have all sorts of folks in the community, farmers, farmer florists, gardeners, hobby designers, lots of people that are interested in learning how to do wedding flowers and some of them are doing it for a business but some of them are doing it just for fun either for their kid who's getting married or their friend who's getting married. That's how I got started by doing flowers for my friend's wedding. So if you're curious about how to get started doing wedding flowers, beautiful flowers like this, join my Flower More community today. There's a discount link in the profile you can join today for 30% off. We would love to have you and love to see you start making designs for somebody's wedding who's special in your life.