Tissue Paper Flowers

Just a quick post today to show you a preview of a project my sisters and I worked on over Christmas. I knew from the beginning that our budget wouldn't allow for a huge flowers allowance. I toyed with the idea of buying flowers wholesale and just arranging them myself—but I discarded the idea after realizing that one, I'm not a florist and two, the week of the wedding is already going to be insanely busy with graduation. In fact, in the entire planning process, we have the most non-wedding events scheduled for the week of the wedding. Also known as—we need to get everything done ahead of time.

There are a lot of different ways and materials to make flowers. First up were crepe flowers.

Image via Design Improvised

I actually tried making these beautiful crepe flowers. Mine didn't turn out quite like the ones in the picture, however. First off, I couldn't find crepe paper sheets to experiment with, much less anything in coral. Second, I couldn't get the hang of manipulating the floral tape and wire. Basically, I'm lazy and this was too hard.

There's also paper flowers, which are beautiful (especially out of pages of books or music) and incredibly time consuming.

Image via Etsy / Photo by annemusingdesigns

Fabric flowers fall into the same category, although if purchased are more expensive than real flowers sometimes—check out the price on this one!

Image via Etsy / Photo by Katie Reim

That leaves tissue paper flowers. There are lots of tutorials out there, but we used this tutorial from Martha Stewart. Honestly, it was so, so easy. And it didn't take up days and days. We did both bridesmaids bouquets and my bouquet in less than two hours (two and a half episodes of Leverage). We also made some extra flowers and started on bigger poms for table and hanging decorations.

Do they look expensive and fancy? No. Is our wedding expensive and fancy? No, so it looks like they'll fit right in! Tissue paper flowers were perfect for the time we wanted to put in and the money we wanted to spend (about twenty dollars including way more tissue paper than I needed and floral wire). This is my sister modeling her bouquet. We used coral, light blue, and light yellow tissue paper. I think I'm going to add some green as well and wrap the stems nicely.

Oh, and my dad pulled out his electric drill to twist the wire on the handles. When my dad participates in wedding planning, he does it in a big way.