Modern Luxury Bridal Bouquet Design ¦ Professional Florist Tutorial

I'm going to show you how to make this gorgeous, expensive cascading peony and orchid bouquet. Hi, welcome to another video. My name is Katherine Bergman. I'm a florist with over 30 years experience designing weddings and events. We have a very special episode today. I'm making this bridal bouquet for my own sister's wedding and I'm going to show you how it's done. You ready? Let's get started. So we're going to construct a modern cascading bridal bouquet today. We're using beautiful Phalaenopsis orchids, white peonies, pale blush roses, and this beautiful Star of Bethlehem as well as some greenery. Now when I'm when I'm doing a modern cascading bouquet, it's going to be hand tied. It's mainly cascading elements coming out of a clustered bouquet, not the old fashioned kind of triangular in a bouquet holder kind of bouquet. I'm going to start with the Phalaenopsis orchid. This is a beautiful stem with a side stem here and this I just cut from an orchid plant and we're going to construct sort of the core of the bouquet with a cascading element. I'm going to start with some of these beautiful peonies in white and then add some of the Star of Bethlehem as sort of an accent background flower. It's a really wonderful flower for using in bouquets because it lasts so long out of water. Now these are older Stars of Bethlehem. Older, I bought these maybe 10 days ago so that they would open to the tip. When they come, they come sort of spiky and you know only a few flowers on the bottom. But I wanted this to be more open, almost a whole stem open by the time I start constructing this bouquet. The blush peonies I bought did not do well. They didn't open and when they did open, they shattered. So I'm improvising with these garden roses and blush. It's just basically a blush and white bouquet. So not that different from constructing a round bouquet but we're just adding flowers and a cascade around this cascading orchid. And I'm making it so it's a little bit lopsided the bouquet so it's like facing outward instead of facing up completely. Now my sister likes everything a little bit more glamorous and romantic and so I'm making something more clustered, not so natural looking. I mean it's still natural, natural flowers, but not as like wild with, you know, a lot of accent flowers and greenery. So something a little bit more contained because I think she likes this more lush and luxurious look. And I want to make sure the bouquet is beautiful from all sides, not just from the front. And that's what's nice about these more modern cascades. The old-fashioned ones with the holder, it looks kind of flat and from the sides it's not as beautiful. Okay, we're pretty much done constructing the majority of this bouquet. I have one more stem of Phalaenopsis to add in. I'm kind of thinking of adding it in kind of cascading over the whole bouquet to give it a little more movement, just without covering all the beautiful flowers. I'm gonna see where we're gonna add this in, have it cascade over the bouquet a little bit. Okay, so you've got two cascades of orchids, but sort of dynamic having this one come out here instead of another piece coming down here. And there's a lot of movement and it's pretty from the sides. Now I'm going to add some greenery. I have cascades of pink jasmine vine, just going to add a little bit to the bottom of the bouquet to sort of reinforce the line of our orchids. Just a wispy little bit of pink jasmine, not a lot. I'm gonna add some, a little bit of this, a wisp of pink jasmine in the middle of the bouquet so you have a little bit of the greenery for continuity throughout the bouquet. I think you can just tuck it in. And then you can add some of this Italian ruscus to the bouquet top, kind of hold some of your materials in for you. Now I cut a couple of Phalaenopsis orchids off the long stem here, and I'm going to add it to the bouquet with glue. We're going to glue it in here, but we're going to tie this off first before we add that in. Just because the stem was really heavy and I didn't want everything covered, I wanted to be able to place these last two orchids wherever I think, you know, wouldn't look nice. And we may just not use it. We're going to tie this off with this floral tape. I like using floral tape to tie off the ribbon, tie off the bouquet before I put ribbon on the handle, but you can use wire of course. This is a one inch wide width floral tape. I don't know, I've always used floral tape for the hand-tied bouquets and they seem to always work. And the nice thing is it sort of makes it so that the stems are less visible through the ribbon. You have a smoother handle when you use tape versus wire, which adds sort of a strange bulk to it. So this is not for beginners. This is a not so easy hand-tied bouquet, but I wanted you to see how you construct a modern cascading bouquet like this. It's actually not that difficult. It's basically like a round bouquet and we're using cascades of orchids. Now I've also seen some very wispy, airy cascading bouquets lately and they're beautiful too. But for my bride, who's my sister, I know this more glam look is more her style. I'm going to just cut the extra stems off. This is a nice size handle, not too big, not too small, easy to grasp, but not too long. Okay, and I'm going to wrap in this ballet pink ribbon instead of white. This is a double-faced satin I'm using. I'm going to go from the top down and then from the bottom up. I'm going to double wrap this so that you don't see any green or any of the texture of stems coming through. And I always like to do this little row of pearl pins that look like little buttons. It secures your ribbon really well. These are the half-inch pearl headed pins that you can buy on Amazon. They're great because they're not so long that they'll poke out of the other side of the stem, but long enough to secure your ribbon to your bouquet handle. I've done thousands of bouquets, always secure the ribbon this way and I have not had one unravel on me. Okay, so this is mostly done. I'm going to go ahead and put it in the water here because the wetting is not going to be like right now. And the ribbon, yes, will be wet, but it's okay. It's a polyester ribbon so we can wick off the water and dry it off before we need it for photos. Then I'm going to take a look to see if I want to add in the Phalaenopsis orchids that I cut off. Maybe I can add one here. Maybe add one here. I'm not sure. I don't want to add one on each side. I think that looks weird. Maybe we add them in a row here to here. That would be beautiful. This is oasis floral adhesives I told you about. This is something that you must have in your toolkit for gluing fresh flowers. We use this for corsages, flower crowns. It's the best glue. Put some on the stem here. Put one back here so that it faces the bride and we're done. I'm going to show you this bouquet. I'm going to take it out of the water and kind of hold it and move it around so you can kind of see it. So here is this beautiful cascading bouquet handheld. See how it's beautiful from all angles? Not stiff and not flat. So that's how you make a cascading bridal bouquet. Very excited to make this for my sister's wedding. I hope you enjoyed it. As always, please like and subscribe and click the little bell to be notified when I put out a new video. I'm going to be putting out the entire wedding series video next week so stay tuned for that. Meanwhile, go out and buy yourself some flowers this week. Treat yourself. Flowers are nature's little luxury and I will see you in my next video.