Blue Petyl’s Brooch Bouquet Design Tips

1) Limit the Colors!

Brooch bouquets are naturally very intricate and detailed. Too many colors can make them appear chaotic. Most of our bouquets are designed with just two or three colors. If you love lots of colors, we recommend limiting your bouquet to no more than four colors, tops. If you are buying individual brooches for your own bouquet, it can be difficult to find a variety of brooches in a specific color, but don’t compromise! It will be time and money well spent.

2) Say “NO” to the Foam!

We’re astonished how many DIY articles and videos recommend making a brooch bouquet with a styrofoam ball…. Don’t do it! Please! For the love of craft, say “NO” to the foam! When we first started out in 2010, we made a few bouquets with styrofoam balls, and we quickly learned why it’s a bad idea. The build quality, shape, and durability just doesn’t compare to using wires. The foam may seem easier for first-timers, but if you want a bouquet that you’ll be proud to show off at your wedding and ever after, use wires!

3) Have a Design in Mind

Be sure of what you want for your bouquet before beginning work. Once you get started, minor changes are usually possible but an overhaul such as changing colors or shape could be very costly!

4) Don’t forget about the handle

It’s critical that your handle be straight, the right length (two hands), and well dressed. Stay away from pre-made bouquet handles! You might think they will save you time or effort, but they most definitely won’t! They’re designed for fresh flowers, not brooch bouquets! Most DIY articles overlook the handle, but wrapping the collar and handle can be the most difficult part of making your bouquet, but don’t give up! Opt for a simple wrap if it proves too difficult.

5) Limit the glue-gun!

DOn’t be trigger happy with the glue gun! A glue gun may seem like an easy way to make those brooches stay in their place, but you will regret it later. We promise that if you secure your brooches by glue, you WILL have parts falling off… hopefully not during the ceremony!

6) Use high-quality brooches!

Choose your materials carefully! If it looks and feels fragile, chances are it will fall apart during assembly or later. Also, many lower quality brooches will likely tarnish just a few months after you purchase them, leaving unsightly stains in your bouquet.

7) Attitude is Everything

Keep an open mind! Brooches can have a mind of their own, and your design will likely turn out different than what you originally intended. So, stay flexible, and be prepared to make trade-offs as you move forward.

8) If you’re overwhelmed, call the professionals!

Remember that Blue Petyl is here for you if you get stuck or need help. We can make a bouquet using entirely your own brooches, or we can make one from scratch using our own materials. We promise you’ll love our work!

 
- Wini & Joe
Blue Petyl

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Don’t get me wrong: I LOVE fresh flowers (and who doesn’t?)…. but they’re not for everyone. More and more brides are choosing alternative wedding bouquets for a variety of reasons.

Top 10 Reasons To Choose Alternatives for Your Wedding Bouquet

1) Allergies

My Dad had bad allergies… we always made sure keep fresh flowers away from his table! Modern medicine does a good job of keeping allergies in check for most folks, but if Dad has a bad reaction, the whole party can be ruined! How well do you know your guests?

2) Fresh Flowers Are…. Perishable!

The beauty of flowers is fleeting! Wedding florists prepare everything within just a day or two before the wedding so that it’s perfect for just one day. But, by the time you return from your honeymoon, your flowers will be wilted! Some florists recommend “preserving” floral bouquets in a display case for a few hundred dollars extra… but that never made much sense to me, since the whole beauty of fresh flowers can only be enjoyed up close and in person.

3) Price

A good wedding bouquet from a well-recommended florist can easily cost hundreds of dollars. High-end florists charge more. If you decide to “preserve” your wedding bouquet, you’d better budget closer to $1,000… just for the bouquet. It may sound expensive, but florists charge a fair price: it’s not cheap to express deliver stunning flowers by air from half-way around the world (see more on that later).

4) A Dirty Little Secret

Concerned about the environment? Fresh flowers often have a humongous carbon footprint. In the United States and Canada, most fresh flowers are express delivered by air to your table from thousands of miles away: Central and South America, or even Asia. The flowers are grown on large labor-intensive farms, often with little or no environmental regulations. They’re cut fresh, and put on a plane to Miami or New York within hours, then quickly distributed into the hands of florists across the country.

It’s incredible to think about all that is done just so you can enjoy your flowers for a few hours! If you insist on a fresh flower wedding bouquet, try searching for locally grown varieties to avoid the waste!

5) Personalization

Brides today are looking for more and more ways to personalize their weddings, and wedding bouquets have not escaped that trend. Brooch bouquets and other alternative material bouquets can be made to incorporate family heirlooms, personalized messages, or other symbolic figures. Truth be told, a florist can add these things to a fresh flower bouquet as well…. just make sure to recover your heirlooms once the flowers start to wilt!

6) Colors

What are your wedding colors? Red? Orange? Yellow? If so, you have lots of options for a fresh flower wedding bouquet. What about Turquoise? Teal? Grey? Not so much! Brides who are looking to incorporate their palette into their bouquet find that their options may be limited with fresh flowers. At Blue Petyl, we use a diverse variety of materials, and our jeweled silk flower bouquets can generally get much much closer to matching your palette than a florist can with fresh flowers.

7) Reduce the Wedding Day Stress

Fresh flowers must be prepared in the days just before a wedding, and delivered the same day. A wedding can be a stressful event, and it doesn’t help that brides can’t see their flower arrangements until that very day. The good news is that it’s no longer necessary to wait until the last minute! Alternative material bouquets can be prepared and delivered weeks or even months before the big day… it’s one less thing for brides to worry about in the days before their wedding.

8) Compelling Choices

Mention fake flowers, you’ll often conjure up visions of cheap, plastic flowers. For decades, they earned a reputation as a poor alternative to fresh flowers. Well, times have changed! “Real Touch” silk wedding bouquets can look and feel so real that you may only tell them apart from fresh flowers by their scent! Plus, the diversity of materials used for alternative wedding bouquets continues to evolve beyond even silk flowers: buttons, brooches, paper flowers, fabrics… even food! Brides today have compelling choices as alternatives to fresh flowers.

9) Reduce, Reuse, Recycle

Alternative wedding bouquets can take advantage of reused or repurposed items. Look for the green recycle logo on Blue Petyl bouquet designs that use repurposed vintage materials.

10) The Wow! Impact

Our brides frequently tell us their Blue Petyl bouquet was the hit of their wedding! Most of your guests will have never seen anything like our bouquets…. and so we know it will create a buzz! How often have you heard of guests oogling over a fresh flower bouquet? (Hint: not much. Yes, of course it happens from time to time… but, the Wow impact just doesn’t compare with a Blue Petyl brooch bouquet or jeweled silk flower bouquet)

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Top 10 Reasons a DIY Brooch Bouquet Isn’t For Everyone

1) Plan on Making More Than 1 Bouquet!

We hire very crafty and talented designers at Blue Petyl.  We’ve never once seen a new designer make a good bouquet on her first attempt….Or her second….Or her third.  We end up taking apart these first bouquets, and redoing them until they are good.  Sometimes we’re happy with a designer’s fourth bouquet. And if we’re happy with it, we know our customers will be happy too.  If you’ve never made a brooch bouquet before, plan on making it more than once!

2) Colors Matter

Ever notice that most DIY bouquets are a mix of “eclectic” colors?  It can be difficult to find a variety of brooches at reasonable prices in specific colors to match your wedding.

Silver or Pearl are very common colors for brooches, and can be easy to find.  But, the minute we start talking about Turquoise, Champagne, Coral, Fuchsia, Lavender, Teal, Sapphire (or dozens of other specific colors), it gets much more difficult to find brooches, and much more expensive.

Blue Petyl’s advantage is that we have an inventory full of a whole rainbow of materials.  We are able to purchase brooches in large bulk quantities, and thus have access to every possible color for your bouquet.  We also don’t charge extra to customize any bouquet in your colors.

 3) Shake, Rattle, & Roll

Plan to follow DIY instructions?  We don’t recommend using the assembly techniques we have seen in DIY articles and videos. Everything we have seen tells you to secure brooches to a single wire stem, or worse, use a styrofoam ball! Both of these techniques result in loose, poorly constructed bouquets.  When you SHAKE your bouquet, the brooches will RATTLE.  And, some pieces are likely to ROLL off the bouquet at some point because they are not properly fixed.

Blue Petyl Bouquets are well constructed.  Our brooch bouquets are solid, single pieces, not loose bunches of brooches, and certainly you will never find any styrofoam!  Back in 2010, we first started using some of the same assembly techniques shown in the DIY articles. After several customers complained, we created new techniques to properly make solid bouquets that don’t rattle.  It takes more time, but we haven’t had a single complaint since!

 4) All Brooches are NOT created equal!

Some brooches are more prone to rust than others.  Other brooches are more likely to tarnish during a warm summer.  Still others will fall apart or easily break during the assembly process.  If you are buying your own brooches, we recommend that you don’t chase after the lowest prices… these tend to be poor quality brooches. We have made the mistake of buying them ourselves, and we’ve learned to stay away!  If you purchase your own brooches for a DIY project, choose wisely: buy based on quality, not price!

 5) Designs Have Evolved

Every DIY article we’ve seen teaches how to make a basic design…  a bunch of brooches on wires grouped together in a round shape.. done!

In the last few years, popular designs have evolved, and are now more complex than the DIY articles suggest.  In 2013, our most popular bouquets are Tear-Drop or Cascading shaped bouquets, and most brides today want extra details, like handmade couture flowers, crystal sprigs, personalized photos or messages, or similar details.

These more intricate designs that are popular today take much more time than the basic round DIY bouquet, and use a variety of materials beyond brooches.  The cascading or tear-drop shapes in particular take extra time and skill.  At Blue Petyl, we have several full-time professional bouquet designers, only a few of whom are able to make good cascading bouquets… it’s not easy. Even after making dozens and dozens of traditional round bouquets, some designers still don’t have the skill… because it’s so difficult!

 6) It Takes HOW long?

You can easily spend more than 100 hours buying brooches and assemblying a bouquet, if it’s your first time. Even with expert supervision, it takes our novice designers about 15-20 hours just to assemble their first bouquet….which we inevitably have to redo because it’s not very good.  That’s just the assembly… If you want to find and purchase your own brooches and other materials, figure on dozens of hours more.

Planning and preparing for a wedding takes a lot of time; no doubt!  Given all the other demands on your time, use it wisely!

 7) You’ll Need A Good Manicurist

Have soft hands?  Get ready to tear them up!  Our designers all have big, beautiful calluses on their fingers and hands after making dozens and dozens of bouquets.  Those first few bouquets? They poke, shred, rip, and tear your hands!  If you decide to go the DIY route for your bouquet, we’d advise you do it long before your wedding, so your hands will have time to recover.  Then, get a great manicure!

 8) “Why Won’t it Just FIT?!”

Get frustrated easily?  This probably isn’t the best project for you.  Making a brooch bouquet requires a good deal of patience, especially if there’s no one to guide you.  Brooches have a mind of their own, and often don’t go where you want them to go. You’ll probably have to take your bouquet apart and start over from scratch at least once, maybe more. You’ll have to learn how to work with the brooches, and there’s a good chance your bouquet will end up different from your vision.

 9) Pick And Choose Your DIY Projects

Your wedding is full of choices, and there are many opportunities to trim your budget by doing things yourself.  You can make your own centerpieces… table arrangements… party favors… wedding cake…. food.  Some of these things can be made without much hassle, and others require more time or specialized skills.  That’s where the professionals can come in handy.

Invitations, for example, are a relatively simple project to tackle by yourself, especially with modern software and online printing companies to help.  And, depending on how many guests you have, it could save you a lot of money! Ever made your own hair piece or your own garter? Not too difficult. (and MUCH easier than a brooch bouquet!)  We’re probably biased, but we just think if you want a brooch bouquet for your wedding, it’s something better left to the professionals.

 10) Shhhh!  (A Lot of DIYers Don’t Save Any Money At All!)

Don’t read this out loud:  Brides usually pay too much for their brooches.  If you’re spending around $7 or $8 per brooch, we can make you a whole bouquet for about the same price.  Certainly, you can find plenty of brooches for less than $7 or $8 each, but given that some types of brooches are prone to tarnish, and others are easily breakable, you may end up buying more brooches than you would otherwise need for the bouquet.

We’ve also seen many brides come to us in frustration after attempting to make their own bouquet.  By that time, they’ve already gone through the time and expense of purchasing their own brooches, and plus the frustration of building and rebuilding their own bouquet, only to give up and ask us to make it for them.  They would have saved both time and money by purchasing a bouquet, rather than making it themselves.

While you may indeed save money doing it yourself, it is not a sure thing!

If you still think a DIY brooch bouquet is the way to go, we wish you luck! You have an interesting journey in front of you!  If not, please keep us in mind.  We’re happy to make a bouquet for you!

- Wini & Joe
Blue Petyl

Browse DesignsCustom Orders

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