DIY Vintage Brooch Bouquet – Tutorial Part 2

Now that I've wired all my jewelry pieces, I need to put them together somehow. There are a couple of issues to think about at this point. For one thing, you want to be sure that the different colors are evenly distributed throughout the bouquet. The other issue is that you dealing with a lot of pieces of jewelry and you want to be sure they will all be showing when the bouquet is finished.

Having constructed the bouquet before, I learned that I needed to work in small batches instead of trying to gather up all the pieces and hope to have a decent looking bouquet when I finished. So, I began by grouping my jewelry pieces by color. I had groups of red, yellow, clear and white. I decided I would make five bunches, so I divided the number of each color group by 5. That told me how many pieces of each color I would add to each bunch.

As I was working with a bunch, I added one piece from each color group in rotation. That way I knew I wouldn't end up with two of the same color beside each other. I had approximately 14 pieces in a bunch, and this was definitely a manageable group.

Once I had the pieces together, I needed to wrap tape around them all to hold them as I had positioned them. This time instead of using that very sticky floral tape, I decided to use masking tape. I would tear a long strip off the tape beforehand, and then it was easy to wrap the strip around the jewelry stems.

I was pretty happy at how well things went this time with my grouping and wrapping. When I finished, I had five jewelry bundles.

Then I started putting the bundles together. This wasn't particularly hard to do. I wrapped all of the bundles with more masking tape. Because the masking tape wasn't wrapped tightly around the single bundles or big bundle, I found it easy to reposition any of the jewelry pieces that were too high or too low. I pulled and prodded the pieces until I had a bouquet that I liked.

Link to Tutorial Part 1

Link to Tutorial Part 3

Link to Tutorial Part 4