diy flowers I

Somewhere along the line I convinced myself that we could *fairly easily* make our own flowers for this wedding. This very typical behavior for me. I see something in a magazine or in a store and say to myself, "Self, you could totally make that!" So I don't buy it. And then I either forget about it all together or spend WAY too much time trying to figure it out and replicate it at home, spending three times as much money in materials and God knows how many hours making it happen than it would have cost to just purchase the perfect thing right then and there. But I had never fully understood the lunacy of my ways until I got the idea for these wedding flowers.

But let's not get ahead of ourselves--this is obviously going to be a multi-parter. My eldest sister-in-law M (not Madelyn) is supercrafty and makes really beautiful things just for kicks, like lifelike flower arrangements and wreaths and really awesome Halloween decorations. Her table settings seem like setups for home decor photoshoots and she asked for a jigsaw for her birthday. I really wish she lived closer (not just for the jigsaw). Last fall, she heard we were considering paper flowers and suddenly a big package arrived in the mail from Ohio, full of sweet little prototypes of all kinds.

I especially loved the rolled-up roses, but we couldn't figure out how to make them work for what I thought I wanted: a smallish centerpiece that would leave enough room for a family-style dinner and all the place setting stuff for 12 people per table.

She included a couple tissue-paper flowers, and I really liked the look of them, like this one.

 

Pay no attention to my poor camerphone-focusing skills.

Then I started doing more research into tissue-paper flowers, and of course I stumbled onto Martha Stewart's website. I tried a couple of them out.

Not too bad for stuff-in-a-gift-bag tissue paper, eh? 

 

My main reasoning for doing paper flowers was to be able to start working on them way ahead of time and have them all done long before the wedding. (Yes, I actually believed that would happen--what a joke.) With this style of flower, I could just picture six months worth of work taken out by some sort of freak accident where they'd all get crumpled or become a wet, soggy mess. We needed something sturdier. 

 

And then I saw them, the coffee-filter flowers featured on the martha stewart show. It took a bit of finesse, but I was able to put one together pretty quickly:

 We had a winner.