Nick and I made pretty much every accessory involved in the wedding. Not only was it cheaper for us to do so, it added personality! Plus, I love creating things!
A quick note: We didn't use any real flowers in the wedding. I think flowers, especially used during weddings, are beautiful. But they are also very expensive. And then they die. I wanted to do something unique without using real flowers since they die after a couple of days. And I also didn't want to use fake flowers, just because I don't like how that looks.
Bouquets:
A lot of internet browsing led me to the idea of button bouquets. I tossed around the idea of doing just orange and pink, since those were my wedding colors. I also entertained the idea of using felt to create bigger flowers and leaves. But after a lot of research, I decided to stick with an assortment of different colored buttons. Nick and I spent a few hours stacking the buttons, inserting the flower wire, and wrapping the wire tight around its stem. We probably had over 200 button flowers. I wrapped each bouquet together with the green bouquet tape. Then, for mine, I wrapped the stems with material left over from my mom's wedding dress. For my bridesmaids, I wrapped and glued either orange or pink fabric around each set of stems. I wish the bouquets could have been bigger. I really didn't want my bridesmaids to feel silly carrying such a small bouquet. But crafting together each one took so much effort, and I still had a lot of other things to take care of, so there had to be fewer flowers.
For the tossing bouquet, I had to think of something different. Obviously I couldn't toss a bouquet of buttons, that would totally take someone's eye out! So, I crafted a bouquet out of yarn ball flowers. I used these same flowers for decoration (another post for another day). I just made a ton of little yarn balls, and stuck the flower wire in them with a little hot glue. And then I glued the yarn balls together at the top and wrapped some of the leftover tulle from my dress around the stems. I was nervous about it falling apart during the toss. It did, a little bit, but I think it was okay overall. Abbey caught it, which was pretty exciting. She had said she planned to catch it much earlier when I had shown it to her and my other roomies.
Boutonnieres:
For the boutonnieres, I used the same button flowers I used for the bouquets. From Michaels, I bought a bouquet of fake flowers that had nice big leaves. I cut off the leaves and attached three button flowers, or six for Nick, using flower tape. I had to use wire cutters to cut the stems a little shorter. I glued the backs of the buttons to the leaves to keep them from getting floppy, and then attached safety pins to the backs.
Corsages:
It took me a while to figure out how to do flowerless corsages for my house party. I ended up making fabric flowers and gluing ribbon and buttons to them, and then a safety pin to each back. Of course, they were orange and pink.
Headware:
For each girl in my wedding party, I made a flower headband. Actually, Kaitlyn helped me make them. She is splendid like that. They alternated orange and pink. I don't think any of my wedding party will wear them again, the colors are very bright, but I wanted to make sure I had something that tied all of them together since their dresses weren't the same.
Bow ties:
Nick and his groomsmen wore pink or orange bow ties that we made a couple of weeks before the wedding. We used the same material I used to make the headbands and wrap the bouquets. Nick actually designed the bow ties, our friend Josiah ironed on the adhesive to make the fabric thicker, and I sewed them. They turned out pretty cute... I want to wear Nick's as a bow for my hair. I made sure each groomsman's tie color matched the headband and bouquet of the bridesmaid he was paired with for the ceremony.
So, I think that is all. Overall we saved hundreds of dollars by not using real flowers. And now I can have my bouquet sitting on my coffee table, looking the same as it did when we got married.
