DIY Wedding Rehearsal Bouquet

My best friend from college is getting married this weekend!! As her Maid of Honor I have many important duties, many of which I haven't been able to fulfill as I would have liked as she lives in Iowa and I live in Michigan which makes regular meetings and helping with centerpieces and going to dress fittings difficult. One task that I have been able to do well (in my very humble opinion) is make her rehearsal bouquet. I searched and searched the internet for ideas for making this bouquet and having it not look like something made when I was 9 years old. No offense to other MOH's out there participating in this tradition, I understand the true form of the tradition states that the bouquet is made during the bridal shower, not after, thus greatly limiting the amount of time being spent putting the bouquet together. And time, lots of time, is needed to make this bouquet.

Being a huge Pinterest addict I've seen headbands and belts and hairclips made with flowers created from ribbon and many yards of ribbon were exactly what I had to work with. Ribbon and a couple of curly boys and some poly-ribbon. I wanted the main focus to be flowers from the Bed Bath & Beyond purple ribbon and the curly bows to be accents. Here's what I came up with!

Not too shabby huh? Here's some detail pictures for you: 

I found tutorials the following tutorials: Martha Stewart, Burda Style, and Wedding Bee. Truth be told as I progressed in each of these methods I figured out my own way to make the flowers and I encourage you to play with them as well as figuring out how to hold on to all the ribbon before sewing together is sometimes better down in your own words.

After making 40-some flowers I started with the rose flowers based on the Burda Style template that had extra ribbon on below the flower to start sewing the loose flowers together. I just pieced them together to my liking and after about 15 realized it was an odd shape--oops! I did my best to pull and push flowers and sew them in place, alternating the style of flowers. Here's a close up of the bouquet being sewn together:

Then after I got about half-way through with my loose flowers I concocted a handle out of a couple of dead ink pens and wrapped them in none other than painters tape. I wish I would have reinforced the tape with hot glue, but hindsight is always 20/20. I wrapped the loose ribbons around this base and pinned them in with quilting pins and kept sewing on my flowers.

At this point I realized my stem was too short...so I added on another stem, this time the handle from an old foam paint brush. Again I used tape but should have hot glued it to make it more sturdy. I had saved one purple ribbon from making flowers so that I could wrap the stem and I did so, hot gluing it in place until I had formed my desired handle.

Next I had to add in the curly ribbons and the poly-ribbon. I glued on the two curly ribbon bunches right at the base of the ribbon flowers and allowed them to kind of cascade down. I then took the loose poly-ribbons and wound them around the base and hot glued them down to and I was finished!

This took me a good 8 hrs to do in one sitting, so I'd highly encourage you to have a couple of flower sewers as that was the longest part of the process. But it was nice to watch a couple of movies and talk to my little sister who just moved to L.A. while working on it. I'm also proud that it looks a little classier than the norm--just Keli's style! Here's one more shot of my finished project!