Boutie-licious

I failed to find out what Mr. H was looking for in man-flowers until after I did my first round of flower shopping. When I finally did ask (er, bug him endlessly), he said he wanted a single white rose with baby's breath for the dudes. Okay, that shouldn't be too difficult in theory.

I found the perfect flowers for our corsages and boutonnieres at Hobby Lobby. I didn't have the first clue about how to put these suckers together, but a search on the 'Bee brought up a couple of tutorials, which I used as a jumping off point. I started with the bouts since they seemed less scary than the corsages. As I was working on these, I wondered how some brides can figure out how to do this with real flowers the day before their wedding without freaking out.

I gathered my supplies:

• Approx. 1-inch thick ribbon

• Artificial ivory roses, one per bout (save the leaves)

• Artificial baby's breath

• Artificial berries

• Hot glue gun

• Scissors

• Wire cutters

• Netflix movie to keep you entertained (it took me a long time to get the hang of this project)

Step 1: Trim your rose to a more manageable size (stem should be about two or three inches so there is room to hot glue things to the stem).

Step 2: Cut a sprig of baby's breath and hot glue it to the side in an attractive manner.

Step 3: Repeat step 2, but with berries.

Steps 1-3

Step 4: Take the leftover leaves from the flowers. I only wanted to have one leaf, so those other two gotta go.

BAM!

Step 4 continued: Hot glue the leaf to the back of the boutonniere, still gluing directly onto the stem. I tried to hot glue the leaf right onto the flower, but that didn't want to stick. I'm still trying to figure out how to make it stand up the way I want it. H-Dad recommended epoxy?

Step 5: Now that everything is attached to the main stem, trim it down further so it's normal-boutonniere sized.

Step 6: Starting at the base, hot glue the end of the ribbon and attach to the stems, then wrap upward. Secure with more hot glue.

Step 7: Repeat steps 1-6 for each bout (we needed nine). Bask in the triumph of another completed floral project.

Hooray! I love them! They look so good! I am awesome!

Now I just need to figure out the corsages. I read somewhere that a corsage is just a bunch of boutonnieres stuck together, but that seems like it'd be awfully large. Also, I'm using ranunculus for the corsages, and those are somewhat big on their own. I sense an adventure!

Once I get the corsages completed, I think I'll be done with all our flowers, so I'll put together a cost breakdown for all our floral arrangements.

For those brides who are DIYing real flowers the day before the wedding — HOW are you doing it?! For real, I want to know!