Feather Bouquet D.I.Y

I love flowers. Adore them. I have no green thumb to speak of unless I paint it green myself so when the thought of flowers and weddings came into my head, I balked a little bit. Yes, I realize that most people go through a florist who then delivers or has them ready to be picked up the day of the wedding so you do nothing but carry them….but flowers are expensive. And plastic flowers are either lovely but expensive or cheap and a meh price.

So I took matters into my own hands. I fell in love with this idea from Etsy but I didn’t know if I wanted it for myself or just my girls. I decided to go along with it for at least the girls and while picking out the ornaments, my mum picks up this fluffy white ornament and goes, “Isn’t this lovely? What if you had a few more of them and put them together?”

Now normally I am not a feathery person. I enjoy anything animal-esque to be in a print rather than having an actual texture to it. And 3D feathers just never scream at me. However, once my mum grabbed about 5 of them and gathered them up, all I heard was screaming.

Needless to say, I bought six of them and have since made my own fluffy bouquet. It surprisingly works especially well for a winter wedding. The feather balls almost look like a puff of snow or fluffy hydrangeas – which is perfect for combining my love of flowers and my hate of accidentally killing them.

So here is my tutorial on how to make a feather ball bouquet.

What you need:

• Feather balls: essentially these are just Styrofoam balls covered in feathers. I’m sure it would be ridiculously easy to make your own, otherwise check Bouclairs Home or another place that sells decorations like that.
• Floral wire: preferably the sticks. One half of one long wire is enough for each
• Wire cutters: because when there’s wire, scissors will do you no good
• Floral tape
  
• Hot glue gun and glue sticks
• Any extra foliage or decorations for depth: I used red cranberry sprigs/sticks for mine because I wanted a colour contrast and I was dead-set on having cranberries in my bouquet.

Step One:

Cut off any tags for the ornaments if they are store-bought and any ribbons or loops. They are unnecessary and will just get in your way. Heat up your glue gun and when it’s ready, put a wee bit along each side of about half an inch of the wire end. Quickly while the glue is still liquid [and hot!], push the gluey end of the wire into the bottom of the ball, as close to the center as possible. Don’t push too hard though; you don’t need a feather-ka-bob. The glue you put on the end of the wire has probably balled up around the outside of the puncture wound creating a gluey donut – put some extra glue on top of that [I tried spiraling it around the wire] for safety’s sake. Once it’s dry enough that the glue isn’t liable to droop over on you, put to the side and move on.

Glue each of your feathalls [that is my new word combining feather balls together. Think of it as the DIY version of Brangelina]

Step Two

Once you’ve glued all your feathalls, I started by making smaller bunches. Because I had six, I did three and three, and arranging them so I had one that would sit mainly in the center and five around it. I’m a fool for imperfect symmetry. Once you have your small bunches the way you want them, take a length of floral tape and wrap’er up.

It was my first time using floral tape and I found it take a little practice to get it right. A) It won’t stick to you, only itself, except when it doesn’t want to stick to itself like when you’re first starting to wrap it or end it. This is where a little dab of hot glue will put that tape in its place. B) Even though it doesn’t stick to you, eventually your fingers will get oddly sticky. And then sparkles will stick to you and never come off. True story.

Step Three

I found it was easier to add in the cranberry sprigs after I already made the small bunches. Just use your mad floral taping skills and tape the sprigs over-top where you’ve already taped. You almost need to get into the mindset that each small bunch is its own bouquet. Somehow once you put them all together, it just ends up working.

You might notice that sparkly red ball in the lower corner. I also experimented with having some of the decorations into my bouquet….it didn’t really suit my fancy. Too many round things, not enough height!

Step Four

Tape together the small bunches into one big bunch and voila! A feather bouquet! I plan on adding some white tulle or fabric underneath to act like a stem covering and then I have some awesome red ribbon to wrap over top of that.

I’m pretty in love with it. I might be a little bit biased though.