My Real Touch Bouquet

Ever since my lurking days on the bee, I have known I was going to go with Real Touch Flowers for my bouquet. I was so amazed by the fact that they both look AND feel real. Sometimes I had a hard time believing some bouquets that I saw weren’t made of fresh flowers.

Real Touch flowers are good because you can keep them forever. They do cost almost the same as real flowers, but you don’t have to throw them away in a couple weeks. They won’t shrivel up and die or turn brown.

I talked about not being able to go with the shop I really wanted to, so I just gathered flowers and fillers from a bunch of various shops I found via the bee, Pinterest and etsy. I did this over the course of the entire planning process, so I would say another pro is you can buy them early since they don’t ever die.

Some of the shops even made the flowers scented, so it added to the realness of them. I also bought some lily scented oily to put on a few flowers myself.

When I first started shopping for flowers, I had this bouquet in mind as my inspiration. I just loved the colors and the seashells gave it that beach tie-in.

Bouquet created by wedideas

Unfortunately, I ran into a bit of a snag when I couldn’t find the coral lilies. I ended up buying the blue calla lilies from wedideas, so I had to find more bouquets I could use those in. I ended up falling in love with one of their other ones and used it as my new inspiration.

Another wedideas creation.

With these two inspirations in mind, I set out to make my bouquet. Mr. Sea Monkey was working at the racetrack, so I had some time on my hands.

Believe it or not, I managed to get from this:

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To this:

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Making a bouquet takes a lot of time and patience, if this doesn’t sound like you, let someone, who’s done it before, help you. If this is something you want to take on, here’s how I did it.

Materials:

• Flowers of your choice
• Fillers of your choice
• Floral wire
• Floral tape
• Ribbon (or something to tie the flowers together)
• Wire cutters

1.) You need to make a base. This is about three to four flowers, and maybe some greenery, that you’ll build the bouquet around. They will be in the middle when all is said and done.

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2.) Wrap the base flowers in wire, starting from the top and corkscrewing it down towards the bottom.

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3.) Wrap floral tape around the wire. Floral tape is different than, say, masking tape, because it isn’t sticky until you stretch it.

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4.) Build the rest of your bouquet by arranging flowers around the base flowers. For best results, make sure to spread the different flowers, greenery and colors throughout the whole bouquet (i.e. Don’t put two pink lilies together, instead, put a pink lily and a blue orchid together). Just eye what looks best. A fun filler I used was some seashells that I had ordered from one of the shops.

5.) Once your bouquet is how you want it, once again, tightly tie the wire and floral tape around it and cut the stems evenly at the bottom, using your wire cutters. Some of the thicker stems were very hard to cut, so I had to have Mr. D help me.  

6.) Glue the tip of your ribbon at the top of the tape, corkscrew it down and then back up your stems. I left about an inch of stems at the bottom, but you can also cover the whole thing in ribbon. Glue the end of the ribbon.

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There you have it. I added some of the blue ribbon from our invites, some blue jewel pins to hold it in place and a brooch from my late great grandma given to her by my late great grandpa. She passed it to me as a young child when she first got news of her cancer. She meant the world to me. You can decorate it in so many different ways. I’m in love with it!

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Anyone else making their own bouquet? What type of flowers are you using?