How to Make a Hand-Tied Wedding Bouquet
Choose the right materials — you'll need flowers with fairly long stems, such as roses, irises, carnations, alstroemeria, freesias, Singapore orchids or lisianthus. Great choices for foliage include camellia leaves, eucalyptus gum, box, ivy, nandina and leather fern. If you want a mixed bouquet, choose three to four varieties of flowers, plus the foliage. Cut about a yard of string ahead of time.
Cut the ends of the stems on a slant and give flowers a long drink. Remove the thorns, and strip off the lower foliage from the bottom half of the stems. Lay your flowers out on the table, blooms facing toward you. Start off with the largest flower to form the center. Hold the stem between your thumb and first finger on the left hand, about 6-8 inches from the base of the flower head.
Now with your right hand, add about 4- 6 clusters of foliage to frame your center flower (if you're creating a mixed bouquet), evenly and just below the flower head to help fill in the bouquet, criss-crossing the stems on an angle and rotating the bouquet as you work. The goal is to create a "fulcrum" with your stems — a point where all the stems cross each other. Ordinarily, you create this fulcrum near the top of the area where you stripped the leaves, about halfway down the stem.
Point the blooms toward you as you work — not the stems. Secure the stems by winding a piece of string around a couple of times. Don't cut the string!
Holding the bouquet in the same way as before, with the thumb facing towards you, place 5-6 stems of the same type of flowers evenly around, turning the bouquet clockwise, and inserting the stems at a 45 degree angle.
Secure these new stems in place with a couple of twists of string in the same place as before. Continue adding flowers for the next round, arranging these flowers slightly lower. Keep the bouquet a gentle rounded shape across the top, like an upside-down saucer. Criss-cross all the stems, and give the bouquet a quarter turn clockwise after adding a few stems. Secure stems in place with string or wire in the same place as before, as needed.
Continue adding flowers and foliage stems, turning the bouquet around clockwise until the bouquet is the desired size. To frame the result, I've added wired camellia leaves around the edges of the bouquet pictured here, but you could use more pieces of foliage, having the tips extend out about 2-3 inches past the edges of the flowers. Secure all your stems together with string, winding it firmly around several times in the same place as before. Now it's time to cut the string and tuck the end in.
Cut the ends off the flower and foliage stems, so they are about 6-8 inches long and all the same length. Spray lightly everything with water. Finish off the bouquet by wrapping a length of wide ribbon around the stems to cover the string, and tie the ribbon in a shoestring bow (see: how to tie a shoestring bow) with long tails.
Hello,
I am planning on using Gerbers and Roses’s is there anything special I need to do using the Gerbers? Someone said I should be worried about the heads falling off? Any help would be appreciated!!
Thanks!
cher, for added support you may need to wire the flowers individually.
*diy gerbera daisy bouquet and wiring
*diy rose bouquet and wiring
There are special wires for gerberas. They hold the stem and head in proper direction & line up . Call a wholesaler or local florist they might sell you a few
Bless you for all your help.
My daughter is getting married next summer. We are going to make the bouquets out of silk flowers. The wedding will be outside on a ranch so everything is pretty casual. The type of bouquets she has picked out look like someone just went through the garden and gathered a bunch. If they were real flowers I don’t think there would be a problem, because the stems would look natural. She doesn’t want the stems wrapped the way that is so popular now. I think the artificial stems are going to look funny. Any ideas on how we could disguise them?
Darla - definitely, many silk bouquets go with wrapped stems to conceal them. But some don’t. If your daughter really dislikes the wrapped look, try the bouquet without it. Perhaps just tie a wide satin ribbon around the stems at a handy place to conceal any floral tape or wire. If she doesn’t like the results, you have a backup approach.
wrap each stem with green floral tape and then they will look less artificial!
darla,
i am making my own silk bouquets for my july wedding and i was having a similar problem to your daughter. i looked everywhere and couldn’t find the flowers i wanted with long enough stems to just cut and tie. then i found 2 different silk flower bouquet holders at craft stores. the first one i found at acmoore and it was a foam head with the stems already there so all you had to do was stick the flowers with about 3″ of their stem into the foam and hot glue them and you’re done. the second bouquet holder was from hobby lobby (the brand is called bravo) and it looks like a tube with foam inside of it. for this holder all you do is cut the stems to about 3″ and again stick them into the foam BUT for this one you save the leftover stems and cut them into thirds (or to the desired length) and then stick them into the other end of the foamy tube. i personally decided to go with the later because it is the look that i desired, but your daughter might prefer the other holder.
best of luck with the flowers as well as the rest of the planning
I just wondered how many days before the wedding I can make my bouquets? Also, what is the best way to preserve them for the big day? Also im getting flowers from the wholsaler and the roses havent opened all they way. when do they open?
I would love to know the answer to this question
The best situation is the morning of the wedding, if you can. Otherwise, the day before is the earliest you should put them together. If you go that route, don’t wrap the stems until the day of, so you can keep the bouquets in water.
When you first get the flowers, be sure to put the cut the stems underwater, then place in buckets of water. Strip the thorns, and the leaves so they don’t get the water dirty. Keep in a cool room away from sunlight, and soak the stems in flower preservative the day before you make the bouquets. (Be sure to do a trial run with local flowers, maybe Costco or Sam’s Club, before you order a ton of them.)
Finally, after you wrap your bouquets, store ideally in a refrigerator (no fruit in that fridge!). There is a good article at the Knot that goes into more detail:
Homemade Bouquets: The Basics
HTH!
Hey a few more thoughts! your floral supplier can tell you when the flowers are likely to open. Roses open faster than lilies … roses around two days, lilies around four.
How fast they open also depends heavily on how cool or warm the room is where you store them. If time is tight and you need them faster, store them in a warmer environment and warmish water (otherwise a very cool, air-conditioned room is best). Recut the stems and refill the buckets with slightly warm water every few hours if you need them open, fast. Remember to avoid sunlight though.
I read in the Knot that if the rose have not opened engough you can place the stems in a bucket of hot water, but only do this for a couple of minutes just before you are going to use the rose otherwise you might kill them .
Q. with hand-tied bouquets where the stem ends are bare, what do you do to prevent the liquid inside the stems from dripping? Specifically gerberas and mini calla lilies.
Hi Laur — you can seal the ends of most flower stems by dipping them carefully in melted wax.
Does anyone have step by step photos of this? I’m going to practice with silk flowers before I dive into the real thing, however, I am visual learner and am having a hard time picturing the steps!
Thanks!
Hi Carrie:
Technology has marched ahead
An editor from Domino magazine has put out a great little video in how to make a classic hand-tied bouquet, step by step. I think you’ll love it.
im doing a rose bouquet. im wondering how many roses should i use for it not to look too big and not too small?
Hi Tati!
It really depends on the size of rose, arrangement, etc. But … that said … a rule of thumb is that a bridal bouquet on the lush/large side with straight roses may have about 2-3 dozen roses. Attendants’ bouquets, between 1 & 2 dozen. A tossing bouquet, about 1 dozen.
Of course, you can have smaller bouquets that look just as fantastic. I posted two pics here:
first, four larger ones that range from 2-3 dozen each.
second, 2 lovely bouquets ranging from less than a dozen to 2 dozen roses.
Hope that helps, best of luck!
I think it is also important to consider the size of the bride holding the bouquet. No bouquet should overwhelm the bride.
I am doing dahlia bouquets for the bridal party. Do I need to worry about covering the ends of the stems to protect their dresses?