Flower Inspiration

Since it's snowing and blustery outside (to the point where the FI's car door was frozen shut this morning... grrr), I think I may finally be ready to hunker down and work on some flower experiments this weekend.

I've already started trying to copy some of my favorites but don't feel any closer to deciding on what should 1. decorate the tables or 2. be included in my bouquet and the corsages/bouts.

So far, I've made kusudama flowers:

My first attempt w/ origami flowers, based on the instructions at Folding Trees

They are relatively easy but super time consuming.  I think I timed myself at about a minute per petal, and that's just the folding, not the gluing together portion (or the cutting of paper into the right sized square when you've bought something way too large).  Factor in the five to six petals per flower and we're talking about a LOT of time.

I had fallen in love with these after seeing some fun and colorful examples of bouquets on etsy.  But after making a few and realizing that the overall feel of our wedding was changing, I don't think these will be featured.  The only exception is that I might try to include them in a corsage for my mom because she ooooh-ed and aaaah-ed over them dramatically when she first saw them.  (Not sure if that was a mom being a mom or if she was really that impressed.)

Next, I moved onto coffee filter peonies.  My inspiration and instruction came from this:

From Brown Paper Packages

I love how simple these are.  Beautiful, classic and surprisingly realistic.  They are definitely still in the running and I've been testing out colored versions (dyed with food coloring).  I'm still not 100% sure because they involve a lot of floral tape, something I HATE using, but we'll see.

Finally, I ran across this picture recently:

From The Demoiselle

See that beauty in the lower right corner?  I decided that I absolutely had to figure out how to make it.  Then, after a lot of searching around, I realized that I was going to be on my own.  I couldn't find any tutorials or anything even close out there...  But, it looks simple enough, right?  Ha, ha.

I did make an attempt last weekend, after an excruciating trip to Jo-Ann Fabric (seriously, it took me FOREVER to find the sequins...  maybe because I've never, ever bought a sequin before?).

Next up, my learnings about DIY-ing without internet support and a tutorial on how to make (a reasonable facsimile of) the beaded sequin flower above.