How to Choose Flowers for a Wedding Bouquet

Margaret Flis explains step by step how to choose flowers for a wedding bouquet

Okay, we are back with How to make a Wedding Bouquet. I am Margaret from Gathered Stems. The first step is choosing your flowers. There are hundreds of different combinations of flowers. For the purposes of this video, I have chosen hydrangea, which makes an excellence base to your bouquet; roses, which are also a nice choice because of all the colors that they come in and the fact that they hold up so well; and stephanotis, which is a very unique flower thats often used in weddings. What you want to do first is prepare your flowers. Each stem needs to be cleaned. So, take all of the foliage off, even the little pieces up here. Roses; you need to take the foliage off, take off any thorns that you might have, take those off with a knife, and also remove the guard petals, The guard petals are the outer petals that will sometimes have a little bit of brown on them or green on them. You want to just remove those by reaching down close to the base of the petal and snapping it off like that. The last flower to prepare is your stephanotis. It comes with just the flower head and a little bit of a stem down here. So the first step is to remove the stem - just snap that right off, take your stephanotis stem, which is actually a little piece of a sponge on the end of a wire that has a little bit of floc on it. Take the wire end and push through the bottom of the stem; there is actually a pit inside each blossom of stephanotis. Push that pit out, turn your stephanotis stem around, and go right back down through the neck of your stephanotis. That will keep this flower hydrated just like that. The next step for your stephanotis is to take one of your pearl topped pins and your wire cutters, cut that pin with maybe a quarter of an inch of the pin left, and this, we will insert right into the center of your stephanotis down into that sponge. It just finishes off the stephanotis, gives it a very weddingy feel to it. So, I will give a few minutes to get all of your stephanotis, roses and hydrangea prepared, and I will be back with the next step of actually putting the bouquet together.