Kelsey's Crafts: Wedding Bouquet Part 1

I loved preparing for my wedding. I know a lot of people get really stressed and go nuts over little things (looking at you, Bridezillas). But I loved the idea of being able to make our wedding totally crafty and a little nerdy. (Bonus: making most of my wedding elements saved a TON of money).

Now, I have seen nerdy weddings. They are cute and fun, but only to those who are also nerdy. I am not a fan of making the entire wedding video game, anime, whatever themed. There will be relatives there that will have no idea what is going on and they won't have as much fun. This is going to be an unpopular opinion, but I think that you should throw a wedding that is fun for everyone, not something that only the bride is happy with.

We made our wedding classic, but with a couple of nerdy elements thrown in. Our save the dates had an anime twist, but our invitations were classy.

(Spice and Wolf nerdy save the date)

(Classic invitation)

We had a handful of Japanese songs that were meaningful to us, but we played mostly popular music.

We kept our cake classic white, but we had our two Pokemon cake toppers.

(Ninetails with a tiara and Arcanine with a sailor hat)

A great part about having our wedding in the winter was that I was able to incorporate a lot of sparkly elements without it looking trashy. I was also able to use the decorations that the place had set up for Christmas. Frugal win!

I spent a lot of time figuring everything out so with the invitations and the bouquet so I thought that some tutorials might be handy for other brides-to-be. I wanted to start with the part that I had the most fun with: my bouquet.

I shopped around for flowers and the prices made me want to cry. Everything I wanted was outrageously expensive. $150 for flowers that will waste away? I don't think so.

So I browsing pinterest and I saw this tutorial for paper roses. I realized that I could make my own bouquet!

I'm definitely a lily person over a rose person so I looked up origami lilies. It turns out that they look awesome. I knew I wanted a waterfall bouquet because they are just gorgeous so I went to my local florist and bought a waterfall bouquet holder.

(Like this one)

Next I made mountains and mountains of flowers.

The Origami Lily

First, I squared off a whole stack of printer paper.

What? Printer paper? Shouldn't you be using origami paper that costs $10 for a pack of 12 sheets?

Nope. Not this budget savvy bride. I found that printer paper works just as well as origami paper without the high price, but I wanted my lilies to be white. If you want another color you will have to spring for more expensive paper.

I went to Staples and used their long arm paper slicer to make the 8 1/2 x 11" paper into a couple of different sized squares. I made 6" to 8" squares.

Make a fold from one corner to another.

Make another fold meeting the opposite corners.

Flip the paper over and fold in half one each side.

This is a water balloon base. If you are new to origami look up a video on how to make a water balloon base.

You're going to make a squash fold. Repeat three more times so that you have a kite shape.

Kite Shape

Next you're going to fold the lower edges of the kite to the center line. Fold down the top. Unfold.

This next part is a little tricky. You want to use those creases you just made to make a petal fold as seen in the following picture. Put your finger under the first layer of paper and fold the layer up at the top crease while pushing the sides to the center.