bouquet for portrait

April 6, 2009 | by ellie

This weekend I actually got to get all dressed up in my wedding dress – hair, jewelry, makeup and all – and did my bridal portraits. My photographer, mom, and I went to a slightly overgrown garden, where the cherry blossoms and azaleas were in full bloom. It was a gorgeous, sunny and mid-70s kind of day, and we had a great time.

I also got to try my hand at making a bouquet. Since my budget was only $25, I decided to go to Whole Foods and Trader Joes and just buy whatever was available. They actually didn’t have many white flowers beside roses, and so I ended up using a lot more greenery than I had planned on (see my inspiration here). I bought five different kinds of plants, and ended up spending about $31, which wasn’t too bad.

The first thing I picked was freesia, because it smells delicous and looked super fresh. The cottage flower looked a little tired, but I liked that it was more off-white than the freesia, to soften things up. The Italian Ruscus gave a “picked from the garden” kind of look, and the green hellebores was a great filler since I didn’t have much white to choose from. The ginestra was a last minute addition; I couldn’t resist contrast of the long, thin stems with the softer freesia and hellebores.

Once I had the bouquet looking decent (standing in front of a mirror helped fine-tune things) I used a piece of fabric to wrap around the stems. I folded the edges of the fabric under, and used straight pins to hold the fabric on to the bouquet.