Me and my boyfriend, Wren, have been together for 13 years. While neither of us has any desire to get married (been there, done that for both of us), we’ve decided to have a commitment ceremony on our 15th anniversary. That’s still 2 years away, but I want to make most of the stuff we’ll be using in the ceremony, so I decided I would start with my bouquet. I searched the internet for ideas, and found a lot of useful ones, and while mine is far from perfect, I’m pretty proud of the end result. Here’s how I did it:

First, I went shopping. This is by far the funnest part of any project, and since I work at Michael’s, I’m there all the time anyway. I picked up these styrofoam pieces from the floral section to use as my base.

Then I went to the yarn section (my favorite part of the store) and chose some coordinating colors for my flowers.

I bought some pins in the wedding aisle, then went to the ribbon aisle to match up some ribbon with the colors I chose for my yarn.

If you search on the internet, there are tons of patterns for flowers. I tried a lot of them before choosing a couple of simple ones that I liked, and then I made a whole lot of flowers.

I decided to crochet over my foam bases for two reasons. The first one, because if the flowers didn’t cover completely, I didn’t want foam to show through. The second one was because I wanted to hot glue my flowers to the base but I wasn’t sure how the hot glue would effect the foam. I actually love how the pieces turned out once I had crocheted over them.

Because my round foam was hollow inside, I cut a piece of cardboard to fit and seal up the hole. I was going to write up a pattern for this, but it would only work with the exact same size pieces of foam. So I just played with it until I got it right. Next, I used the pins to place all of the flowers on.

Once I had the whole thing covered, I moved them around until I had them exactly where I wanted them. Then I pulled them off one at a time and hot glued each of them on. I wanted to keep the pearl pins in the smallest flowers, so after I hot glued them, I stuck those pins back in. Then I attached my handle to my base.

Crocheting around the bases also made it easier to attach the handle. I simply used a yarn needle and yarn and sewed it on. To give it added stability, I use some of my pins and pushed them through the handle and into the cardboard. Next, it was time to attach the ribbon. This was the hardest part for me. Hot glue is messy, and once it’s on you can’t readjust. If I were to do this again (which I probably will be for my bridesmaid’s bouquets), I would probably use a different glue for the ribbon. Maybe fabric glue.

Even with the little mess-ups that I had on the ribbon, I was thrilled with the way it turned out. It was fun to make, and I think it will be a beautiful bouquet for me to carry in a ceremony where I’ll be crocheting most of the stuff we’ll be using.

Over the next 2 years, I expect I’ll be posting a lot more photos of things I plan to make. Follow me on Facebook to see them as I post. Thanks for checking out my bouquet! If you’ve made a bouquet before, I’d love to see it. Drop me a comment with a link, or post a photo on my Facebook page.