Vintage Brooch Bouquets

We wanted to have lots of unique touches at the wedding and the only way to get that is to make it yourself.  We literally worked for 10 straight months to do just that.  This is the only pic I can find of the ring bearers bowls that I made, hopefully I'll find more eventually.  This one isn't even finished but it will give you an idea of what they looked like.  Ribbon runs through the 2 holes to hold the rings in place.  One bowl reads:  'With This Ring'   and the other bowl reads:  'I Thee Wed'.  I placed two birds on each bowl and I painted the bottoms gold.  They are now usable keepsakes.
    

This is a pic of the beginning of a huge project.  I made vintage brooch bouquets.  Early on, we thought the flower girls might carry them but they were too heavy and we wanted fresh flowers so we used them to decorate the cookie table and some were set around as centerpieces on other tables. At the end of the night the flower girls picked the one they each wanted and the others were given away. The largest one was given to the bride.

I spent months searching for and buying vintage brooches from thrift stores.  Each brooch had to be wired with three wires which had to be twisted together.  My fingers were like pincushions.

I wired and wired and wired brooches until I had enough to make one bouquet.

Then I would painstakingly wire them together, finish the handles with satin ribbon and pearls and start on another.

In total, I made 9 of these.  The bride's is silver and rhinestone and is huge and has over 400 brooches on it.

And the panels!  What a love/hate relationship I had with these. I thought it would take me 2 months to make 22 feet of these.  It took me 6 months.  There were changes and do overs and more changes until I got them right.  These hung in my basement the whole time so we did wash and treadmill and all sorts of things with these hanging around us.

And finally the cookies....the blessed cookies!!!  1500 of those suckers in the last 8 days.  And while I was up to these projects, The Bride and Groom worked tirelessly making hundreds of origami cranes and hearts, 3D signs and table numbers which they painted. They designed their own fabulous invitations too. They worked at least as hard as I did if not harder.  At the end though, we all agreed it was worth the effort.