How To Make A Ladies Double Rose Corsage With Sedum Detail

Hello and welcome to Flourgies, my name is John MacDonald and today we're going to look at making a corsage. Now we have done one or two buttonholes and corsages before but I've got these really lovely little orange roses. I wanted to use some of these little sedums and little pieces of plant material as well as some carnation petals. So we're going to create a corsage that's slightly on an autumny feel. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to wire the materials first. We've actually got a couple of videos that show you how to do this so rather than sitting watching me do every single stem then what I'll do is I'll pre-prepare this and then we'll show you how that we can actually put it together. So let's get started. Okay so what I've done is I've prepared our materials. With the rose you put a strong wire up the stem and then you go through with a thinner wire but still quite a secure wire. You can go round and then so this one's giving the support and this one's stopping it from turning. For the little ribbon what I've done is I've just done loops and then just done a little wire just to catch them. So we've got them. The great thing about ribbon is that you're really bringing in some colour. So some colour into a design that you might not have had with the flowers. For this, this is the carnation and all you do is take a few petals, make a loop with your wire and just create what we call a feather and this again is a good way of bringing in colour. And then my little sedums or my little plants I've got little house leeks and another kind of variety of sedum and I've just snipped off. They've got a little bit of stem and that just gives us enough just to catch them for, well to catch hold of them for us to make this corsage. And these are actually really cute, really sweet. We can enjoy doing that. Now I quite like ivy leaves as a backing. They're nice and firm, they give support and they create a nice framework. And I've also got this grass. Now with this grass I'm not planning to wire it because it's got such a thin stem and it's quite secure so we can just really use that direct into the corsage as we create it. So what I might do is just take one or two of these off just now and just take away any bottom flowers or whatever you call these things and that will make it easier. So what we're looking for with this corsage is rather than just having a simple flower we want it to have a little bit more interest. And the wire that I've used here is a 0.26. If you want it to go a little bit finer you could use a 0.28 rose wire. But this 0.26 is quite firm actually. It's quite good. It'll give us a lot of strength. So the first thing I would want to do is start creating my point really. So I'm going to just take an ivy leave and a little bit of the grass and then just using the tape, the flower tape, we can start to tape that on. Now I think what we'll do is we'll have a little bit of interest right up the top. So really I'm just lying these stems beside each other because they've been taped they slightly grip each other anyway. In the past people used to turn them and twist them but you really don't need to do that to make it secure and actually just lying them straight gives you a really nice clean back to your actual creation. Whereas if you start putting in a turn and everything then it becomes a little bit lumpy and bumpy. Whereas this is giving us a really nice clean backing to our corsage. So I'm just looking for my smaller rose and you can see how they face as well. They face in different ways. So I'm looking for how best that's going to just sit in there. Another thing to remember is don't use your good scissors for cutting wires. So I've got a pair of scissors that I use for the ribbon for example and it's nice scissors. They're not getting used for cutting wire stems. It's so easy to make that mistake. So I can put one or two stems there at the same time and then just use this tape just to bring them together. What we're doing is we're trying to build up a little design where everything sits nicely. So really our next big flower is going to be this other rose. I just want to put another little bit of tape around it now. When I first learned how to do corsages it said use the finest wires you can so that you keep everything really light. Well that's true. You want to do that but you also want to have a little bit of strength in this stem that runs up the back especially when you're joining on another heavy flower. This is the thing that gives the whole thing stability so actually having at least one wire in there that's quite strong is quite important. Now I've got my carnation there so what we can do is we can bring carnation there. In some ways ribbon's a little bit old-fashioned I would say but why not? It's quite nice as a little detail and I think if you're making a corsage you're already making something that's meant to be special. So I did go around that once and that's gathering things. As you go you can actually cut out wires as well and that will help make things lighter. We've put a few stems in there now so now I'm just going to tape that. You can actually use a binding wire so you get a reel of wire that's quite fine that you could put here, bind round and that helps pull things together and just make it really really firm. Personally I've not, I don't tend to use it but I'll use it now and again. It depends on the materials that you're using. Let's have that one there for a wee bit of colour. So essentially we've got a focal flower, we've got a point, we're creating like a little design and I want to bring in a few more leaves. So again just you can put a little bend on them that creates your framework. So you can see straight away that those last leaves just frame this material and finish it off. So I'll just bind that. This is one of these things that if you've not had a lot of practice of creating it is worth now and again just practicing but if you're working in a shop and you've got a lot of wedding work you'll end up doing these every weekend and quite regularly and the more you do the easier they become. I'm just going to bring in a little bit of the grass lower down because we've got it up here. I really want it back down here as well so I can just work that in. I can either thread it in. As long as the stems come that I can catch them with the tape then that's the main thing and you can see this is giving the corsage some movement, some interest and it's quite pretty. So now we can just bind off our stems. We can cut our stem and this is quite traditional just leaving a straight stem. After cutting it I would actually be inclined just to do another tape over that because that just helps take away any sharp edges that are down here. Now you might want to put a bend on this. You might want to leave it longer and make a curl. What a lot of people do nowadays is they like to do a decorative binding down the bottom. So this is like a paper covered wire. What we can do is we can bind over and this just takes away the green, gives a nicer stem, makes it more interesting. You could even put a pin in that end so that you get like a pearl headed end. Now you could use wool or some other material if you want to over bind. It's up to you what you want to do. The only thing I would say is if you go with something that's very thin you're going to end up taking longer to do it and then we just want to secure this up this top end. So you don't want any wires to be sticking out that's going to catch anyone and if you have a wire you can just fold it in with the tips of your scissors and there we go. This I would say is definitely for a lady because it has more detail. You could add and change things to suit but essentially we've got quite a simple corsage or quite a complicated corsage but it was actually quite simple to make. If you look at the back you're essentially doing like a stepped design like a leaf. So if you follow that principle you'll find that you're able to space your material really well and you'll create something that hopefully your customer or you will really really enjoy. So thank you for watching I hope you've enjoyed today's video. What we've done is we've created a really nice autumnal corsage using seasonal materials and little things that are quite interesting so even just the loops of ribbon rather than a bow the little sedums just makes this a little bit more special a little bit more interesting. So if you've enjoyed today's video then click here to subscribe. We have new content every week and we'd love you to join us again for more floral fun. So take care everyone. Bye for now.