DIY Vintage Brooch Bouquet - Tutorial Part 3

My niece requested ostrich feathers somewhere in her bouquet because her dress has some ostrich feathers on the bottom. So, I bought an ostrich feather trim from an Etsy seller. I placed the trim - which measures 6" long - on the sticky side of a piece of green tape that is about 2" longer than the trim on both ends. The tape is Scotch plastic tape.

I turned the bouquet upside down and started rolling the tape with trim around the top of the bouquet, right below the jewelry. I had to be really careful because the feathers kept getting stuck to the tape as I wrapped it around and also wanted to hang up in the jewelry. I pulled as tight as I could while I was wrapping the tape around.

My next step was to take the red hydrangeas which were the next layer and position them around the bouquet under the feathers. Again, I worked with the bouquet upside down, because I wanted the feathers to stay where they were and it was easier to keep them that way from an upside down position.

I held the flowers in position and took my green tape and started wrapping it around. Again, I pulled it as tightly as I could. This was difficult at times because I was trying to hold the flowers in position with one hand and wrap with the other. The tape doesn't look as smooth as it could but I'm going to cover it anyway.

I'm going to go back and wrap the stems again and go all the way down to the bottom. But I'm still working on ideas for what will cover the bouquet handle and so will go back and do that as part of the final step.

Here is the bouquet with feathers and flowers attached.

Link to Tutorial Part 1

Link to Tutorial Part 2

Link to Tutorial Part 4

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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

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Vintage brooch bridal bouquet

A LOVE OF VINTAGE

My niece will be getting married at the end of June. When she started thinking about planning for her wedding, she decided she wanted a vintage wedding because of her (inherited) love for vintage. She asked me to think of ideas. After looking around on the internet, I ran across vintage brooch bridal bouquets. I'm sure if I had been looking at wedding stuff before, I would have seen them because they're evidently a big thing in weddings right now.

If you haven't seen the variety of bridal brooch bouquets, run a search on Etsy. There are some really lovely ones and they come in all colors.

After showing my niece the bouquets, she fell in love with them - no surprise, of course. I decided I would try to make her one. There are also instructions and tutorials on various websites. The good news is that I had a stock of vintage brooches and earrings that I had bought for other projects.

I went to work on wiring the jewelry and wrapping the wire with tape for added strength. It took me awhile to get a system down but once I did, it wasn't so bad. The worst part was using the floral tape. It sticks to everything and leaves a residue on your hands forever. I hated that part of it.

IN PROGRESS

I'm posting a picture of my end product but will have to tell you that I am going to deconstruct it. I have decided that I want the jewelry to be less spread out over the hydrangeas that I used as a base, so that the flowers will be barely noticeable. Also, my niece has since purchased her dress and it has ostrich feathers on it. She wants me to add some to the bouquet. I have bought an ostrich feather trim from a seller on Etsy that I will wrap around the bottom of the bouquet. I sure hope it will work.

Her colors are yellow and red. So, I tried to find brooches and earrings with those colors but I also included pearls and lots and lots of rhinestones. They really make it sparkle.

Once I'm ready to reconstruct the bouquet, I will post pictures of my process in case there are others of you out there who would also like to try your hand at it. In some ways, it was harder than I thought it would be and in some ways easier. I made some mistakes that were costly in terms of time so I hope I can help someone else avoid those.

OTHER PROJECTS

I have other projects going for the wedding. I'm painting candles for the table centerpieces using paper doilies. I'm making the bridesmaids' bouquets and corsages for the mothers and grandmothers. I am using vintage plates to make serving stands. And I will be making some soap wedding favors.

OK - now I've stressed myself out talking about it all so I think I need to stop writing and start working.

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