DIY ribbon flowers for your bouquets, boutonnieres, decor, and more

I never counted how many ribbon roses I made before the wedding. Let's just say the number is probably somewhere in the mid-to high-hundreds, and I can now do them in my sleep! They started as something cool I wanted to have in my bouquet, and ended up being visible almost everywhere in the wedding. Basically every spare moment I had sitting in front of the TV was spent making flowers.

The original tutorial was found here. It's a pretty complete tutorial, so definitely check it out. They are super easy to make after the first few.

I played around with how tightly to wind the ribbon and got a large variation in the shape of the flowers. Approximate size is adjusted mostly with the width of the ribbon, so try a bunch of different sizes!

Here are all the different ways I used ribbon roses to decorate my wedding…

Bouquets

The bouquets were assembled just like a bouquet of real flowers: by working from the inside out, adding different flowers as I went. Then I twisted the stems together a bit and wrapped a little more floral wire around them to keep them in place. So that we wouldn't have to hold on to the sticky floral tape, I wrapped the stem of each bouquet with leftover ribbon and pinned it in place with extra pearl head floral pins that I used for the ric-rack flowers.

Boutonnieres

To go with the bouquets I made for myself and the ladies in our wedding party, I made floral ribbon boutonnieres for all of the guys. Using the same ribbon roses and ric rack flowers as the bouquets tied things together nicely. I had a ton of fun going through various purple quilting fabrics so I could get a variety of colors and patterns for the leaves. But my guy got his own special addition: a little 8-bit figure of Link glued to the front.

Reception decor

For the dinner tables I made bundles of 10 of each color flower and put them in jars to go around the table centerpieces. Each table had one bundle in each color surrounding a photo lantern centerpiece featuring our engagement photos. The fabric flowers on the front of each jar were made just like the bottom layer from this tutorial, and attached with hot glue.

For the dessert and guest book tables I used the extra flowers to make mixed arrangements that matched the bouquets. Here is a picture of one from our “guest book” photo frame table where we left a few photo albums people could look through.

Ring pillow

The tutorial I found for making the ring pillow of fluffy floraliness is located here, but I made a few small changes. I used raw silk as a fabric. Instead of fray-stop spray I used the kind you just paint on the edges. After hot gluing the petals together I glued them on a small pillow I made out of the same material and glued a ribbon in the center to hold the rings in place.

Tutorials

Over the course of my planning I spent some time looking through tutorials and trying different ones. Here are some good listings of tutorials for making fabric and paper flowers:

• Skip to my Lou: 10 Beautiful Flower Tutorials
• Tipnut: 50+ Paper Flower Tutorials and Templates
• Living Locurto: How to make Fabric Flowers
• Tipnut: 40+ Charming Fabric Flowers to Make
• Little Birdie Secrets: Fabric Flower Tutorial Roundup