Flowers?

So this past Friday was my official last day of classes (hooray!), and though I still have exams this week, I took a little break over the weekend to soak up the amazing (AMAZING!) weather and work on a few wedding-related projects. I'm not sure if we've broached the topic of flowers yet, but I do plan on making fabric flowers for my bouquet and for various other applications. I guess it depends on how well it goes. I can totally imagine freaking out at the eleventh hour and running to Wegmans to buy fresh, overpriced grocery store flowers. But in the hopes of avoiding that moment, I spent a couple hours Saturday afternoon looking up tutorials and messing around with the scraps of fabric I've collected from sewing bridesmaids dresses. Long story short, here's what I came up with:

Pretty basic. Just petals sewn on to a small ball of wool. To clean up the edges, I plan on just trimming the petals a bit, then painting on some fray-check or even acrylic matte medium. I know that if you use synthetic fabrics, you can flame-seal the petals, which also gives them a little shape, allowing the edges to curl slightly. This was pretty good for a test run, I think.

How this is going to translate into a bouquet, I'm not so sure yet. But this is some of the inspiration I've collected:

I'm thinking I might bleach or dye some of the scraps I have to get variations of the coral color. I'll probably play with some other fabrics to add some textural variety, like the charmeuse and chiffon that's leftover from my dress. I've seen some amazing felt flowers out there too, like these ones. I can't wait to have my slaves bridesmaids here to help me make them!

If anyone has ideas or projects (or better yet, templates!) they'd like to share, I'd love to hear about it.

Talk to you soon!
Gabby

P.S. Have you gotten your invitation yet? Let me know if you'd like to RSVP!