Hello... I am still here... I have unfortunately been afflicted with a horrible disease which has stopped me from posting anything. You may have heard of it? Its called laziness...
Its been a very busy 7 months, with working full-time and planning a wedding, but that's no excuse. I will try and be better!
So yes, big thing happened, got married back in June. Of course my first thought (well, after "fuck, I now need to plan a wedding") was that I needed a knitted bouquet. Other than Mr Owl, no one else was really sold on the idea (no flowers at the wedding? will they really stand up?), but I ignored them as usual.
I started playing around with patterns on Ravelry and dug out a book that I won on a WI raffle but had never looked at. Then, after seeing this (there was a lot of pinterest and googling going on), I decided I absolutely had to have lavender, and bought the book that the pattern was from.
As you can imagine, I ended up with a ton of rejects that I wanted to somehow use. I had a first crazy idea to do some sort of wall piece but the scale of that seemed a little too much. Mr Owl then suggested that I make mini bouquets to tie up on the aisle chairs as decorations. And that became the plan. I was excited. Of course at the point I had not realised the scale of that task. Each bouquet had to have at least 6 flowers otherwise it would look sad. We initially had decided to do 10 rows of chairs, so that's 20 bouquets. Which means 120 flowers plus foliage plus the actual bouquet plus the buttonholes.
I'm not going to describe how at some point I lost the will to live and cursed myself for my crazy ideas. Instead, I'll pretend it never happened and just share some pretty photos with you, taken by my lovely photographer Hannah.
If you are wondering about the flowers, we have daisies from this book, the lavender, campanula and leaves from this book, a generic flower pattern from this book and a carnation I found on Ravelry. There's also a dark purple flower that I honestly have forgotten where its from but probably from one of the first two books.
I used florist wire for the stem, which I anchored through the base of flower and then twisted in itself, essentially halving its length and doubling its width. I don't remember the size (width and length) but medium width and long length is a good guess. I found that the really fine wire was just too flimsy and the very thick wire was difficult to use.
I toyed with the idea of knitting an icord to cover the stem but quickly decided that it wasn't necessary and just used washi tape instead. But beware, when I ran out of washi tape I bought some florist tape and it was a nightmare to use as its not as sticky...
As I wanted a more wild-, natural-looking bouquet, I didn't stick the flowers in a styrofoam ball, like others have done before. I just tied the whole thing together with string and then covered it with a crochet lace ribbon.
The mini bouquets are basically the same but have some other random flowers and leaves in them too (from the two books). I ended up using 7 flowers in each but did fewer bouquets.
And finally, the lavender buttonhole was made in essentially the same way but I used much much shorter wire of course.
Some final thoughts. Crochet is definitely better for flowers than knitting. Especially for anyone making as many flowers, crochet is so much faster and produces a much tighter/stiffer flower. The only one that was worth doing as a knitted flower was the lavender.
If anyone reading this is thinking about it, my advice is do it, even if just for the bouquet. Yes, there was cursing, yes I had to go to the pub with my yarn to stay on schedule, but I now have a beautiful bouquet in my living room that will always remind me of my wedding day. Plus, all the bouquets disappeared from the chairs as soon as the ceremony was over, which made it worth the effort!
Its been a very busy 7 months, with working full-time and planning a wedding, but that's no excuse. I will try and be better!
So yes, big thing happened, got married back in June. Of course my first thought (well, after "fuck, I now need to plan a wedding") was that I needed a knitted bouquet. Other than Mr Owl, no one else was really sold on the idea (no flowers at the wedding? will they really stand up?), but I ignored them as usual.
I started playing around with patterns on Ravelry and dug out a book that I won on a WI raffle but had never looked at. Then, after seeing this (there was a lot of pinterest and googling going on), I decided I absolutely had to have lavender, and bought the book that the pattern was from.
As you can imagine, I ended up with a ton of rejects that I wanted to somehow use. I had a first crazy idea to do some sort of wall piece but the scale of that seemed a little too much. Mr Owl then suggested that I make mini bouquets to tie up on the aisle chairs as decorations. And that became the plan. I was excited. Of course at the point I had not realised the scale of that task. Each bouquet had to have at least 6 flowers otherwise it would look sad. We initially had decided to do 10 rows of chairs, so that's 20 bouquets. Which means 120 flowers plus foliage plus the actual bouquet plus the buttonholes.
I'm not going to describe how at some point I lost the will to live and cursed myself for my crazy ideas. Instead, I'll pretend it never happened and just share some pretty photos with you, taken by my lovely photographer Hannah.
If you are wondering about the flowers, we have daisies from this book, the lavender, campanula and leaves from this book, a generic flower pattern from this book and a carnation I found on Ravelry. There's also a dark purple flower that I honestly have forgotten where its from but probably from one of the first two books.
I used florist wire for the stem, which I anchored through the base of flower and then twisted in itself, essentially halving its length and doubling its width. I don't remember the size (width and length) but medium width and long length is a good guess. I found that the really fine wire was just too flimsy and the very thick wire was difficult to use.
I toyed with the idea of knitting an icord to cover the stem but quickly decided that it wasn't necessary and just used washi tape instead. But beware, when I ran out of washi tape I bought some florist tape and it was a nightmare to use as its not as sticky...
As I wanted a more wild-, natural-looking bouquet, I didn't stick the flowers in a styrofoam ball, like others have done before. I just tied the whole thing together with string and then covered it with a crochet lace ribbon.
The mini bouquets are basically the same but have some other random flowers and leaves in them too (from the two books). I ended up using 7 flowers in each but did fewer bouquets.
And finally, the lavender buttonhole was made in essentially the same way but I used much much shorter wire of course.
Some final thoughts. Crochet is definitely better for flowers than knitting. Especially for anyone making as many flowers, crochet is so much faster and produces a much tighter/stiffer flower. The only one that was worth doing as a knitted flower was the lavender.
If anyone reading this is thinking about it, my advice is do it, even if just for the bouquet. Yes, there was cursing, yes I had to go to the pub with my yarn to stay on schedule, but I now have a beautiful bouquet in my living room that will always remind me of my wedding day. Plus, all the bouquets disappeared from the chairs as soon as the ceremony was over, which made it worth the effort!
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