Embracing the Present

"Embracing the Present" is the name of my new Etsy shop. I wanted something that would tie in with my vintage shop "Touching the Past." My new shop will feature items I make, such as button bracelets and brooch bouquets. I had forgotten how hard it is to fill a shop, and I am slowly adding items.

I wanted to show some of what I have so far in the shop. I have several wedding brooch bouquets available and am going to add more. These will be ready-made as I don't have the time right now to do custom requests. I have a cameo brooch bouquet for the bride who wants a victorian wedding.



There is a peacock brooch bouquet. This seems to be a really popular theme in weddings these days.



And my most recent brooch bouquet is in metallic colors. It has gold and silver jewelry and there is a touch of copper in the middle of the hydrangeas at the base. Martha Stewart has some wonderful ideas of how to use copper, gold and silver as the colors for a wedding here.



I've also added a number of button bracelets made from vintage buttons. Right now, I have several which were made to highlight some glass paperweight buttons I have. I love all vintage buttons but paperweight buttons have to be my favorites. They look just like miniature paperweights and are amazing in detail and artistry. If you're interested in finding out more about them and their history, this site is a good resource. Most of the paperweight buttons I have used have a flower in middle, usually a pink one. These are the bracelets I've made from them:







I hope you'll stop by to visit and to see additions to my new shop.

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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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