My beautiful sis got married a month ago.  Before her wedding she sent me a picture of a felt bouquet that had appeared in a magazine.  She said that she would love to have something like this for her bouquet.  I took one look at the picture and stated "I can do that".  That started a project that lasted months and was quite a labor of love. 

Before I could begin I had to figure a few things out.  My sis gave me these paint chips as her wedding colors.  I picked out felt (and some flannel) to use as my color palette. 

I invested in a Big Kick from Sizzix, because I didn't want to be cutting a zillion flowers by hand.  I purchased this and the die cuts from JoAnn's during a 40% off sale.  I have nothing but good things to say about the Big Kick.  I could cut two layers of felt at at time and the whole thing was a breeze.  It's definitely a good investment and something I will use for years.

After I had my cut flowers, I had to figure out how to assemble them.  The example bouquet used vintage buttons.  I also used buttons, but went with abalone shell as my main buttons, because they added a nice shiny fancy look.  I used smaller acrylic buttons to help round things out.  I also set up rules about what colors to use when and how I was going to embellish the flowers with embroidery.  Having boundaries to work within helped make the flowers gel together even though each flower was unique. 

This is the demo I mocked up to get a sense of what the heck I was doing.  I used floral wire as my stem.   This flower is about 2 inches wide.  I ended up making most of the flowers smaller than this.

Once I realized that this project was actually going to work, I put flower combinations together in individual zip lock bags.  In the end, I changed almost every single flower that I had previously put together, but having them set up like that really helped me to visually figure out what I was doing.  I ended up not using the blues because the fabric was not cooperating with me. 

Here are the first three flowers that I made and Atty who wouldn't stand still.  After I had gotten this far, it was just a matter of making lots and lots of flowers.

Once I had lots of flowers made, I started to wire groups of them together to figure out how big each bouquet should be.  I also realized that I needed some smaller flowers to fill in gaps.  I didn't embroider the smaller flowers.  I think it added a nice dimension to the bouquets.  

My sis had the added request of a special flower to represent our grandmother who passed away a few years ago.  I made the white flower and used my grandmother's turquoise beads.  This flower also served as something old and something blue.

Wrapping the bouquets was a challenge of its own.  All the tutorials I could find online about wrapping bouquets used an open stem wrap.  This wouldn't work for me since my stems were wire.  Finally I just dove in and figured it out on my own.  First I wrapped the bouquets in felt to add some cushion to the handle and give it a better feel.  I also wanted to take away any possibility of wires poking people. 

Then I wrapped the stems with floral tape.  This worked really well because the final ribbon stuck to the tape well and made wrapping the ribbon much easier. 

Here is a finished bridesmaid bouquet. 

Here are all the finished bouquets.  I'm overjoyed with how these turned out.  They came out much better than I had expected.  I had very few dead ends and mishaps.  I am so happy I could make this present for my sis.  Now every time she looks at her bouquet she will remember her beautiful wedding.

**I'm happy to answer any questions that you have.  Leave a comment and I'll respond directly back to you.