Brooch Bouquet Part 2-- Assembly

So here we go with the step by step for making a brooch bouquet.


Supplies:

24 gauge floral wire
white floral tape
5 bunches of white silk hydrangeas

The first thing you need to do is gather up all of your brooches....
I separated mine by size. I found it easier to work this way, especially when it came time to assemble the bouquet.

The next task is probably the most time consuming. That would be the wiring of each brooch. I did this over a period of about a week. Like I said in my previous post, I read about a lot of gals who complained about the wiring hurting their fingers, so I made sure I only worked until my fingers hurt. When they started, I'd stop and continue later on. I wired a total of 150 brooches and buttons. I didn't use them ALL, but I wired all of them because I wasn't sure which I would be using...

I had to wire the brooches and buttons differently. The brooches, obviously, had pins on the backs. The buttons were a bit different because they either had the one hook or had holes in the button themselves that I would use...

So, the first step is to cut your wire. I did ALL of my wire cutting first. I used 24 gauge silver floral wire. I cut them into strips that were 15 inches long.

Once the wire was cut, I started to wire the brooches. I used two pieces of wire. One on each side of the brooch. If it was a button (like the photo below), I would take two pieces of wire and just make sure it was good and secure. I would wrap the wire around each post of the pin on the brooches. I used needle nose pliers to make sure the wire was nice and tight around each post.

Once you have both pieces of wire secured onto your brooch or button, you need to twist them together to form a stem.

Twist the two pieces of wire together until you have a used the full piece of wire that you have. The one really important thing that you want to remember is that each brooch or button needs to be able to "stand" on its own once it is wired. I made sure that I could hold it about two inches down and it would still stand straight up on the wire.. like the picture below.

The reason you want to do this is because you want the brooches to hold their own when you put them into the bouquet.

The next step is to cover the wire stems with floral tape. This is super easy. My fingers got pretty sticky with the tape. Make sure that when you put the tape onto the wire that it's pretty tight. Just don't put too much pressure onto it because you'll rip the tape.
I chose to use white floral tape since all of my brooches and buttons were crystal or pearl, and the flowers I will be using are white as well.

Start as close to the top of your pin as possible when you are putting the floral tape on.....

And wrap it all the way to the bottom of the stem.

Once you have all of your brooches wired, I recommend you separate them into sizes. I separated mine into three different categories: Small, Medium and Large. The reason for this is because I wanted to make sure I used all of my large ones first, and used the other two sizes as the fillers.

Once they're separated, I bunched together the hydrangeas that I had. I used FIVE stems of white silk hydrangeas. I wanted a BIG bouquet, so that's why I used so many flowers.

Also, make sure you take the leaves off of the stems as well.

Once I had them bunched how I wanted, I tied them together with floral tape and cut down on the stems becuase they were WAY too long..

Now for the fun part!!! Putting your brooches into the bouquet.
This took a lot less time than I thought. I had to take a break at one point, because the bouquet was getting heavy!

The first thing that I did was put all of the large brooches through first. They're obviously the prettiest and the ones you spent the most money on, so they deserve some spotlight. I of course, don't have any pictures of JUST the large brooches.

Once I had all of the large ones in, I took the floral tape and taped the hell out of the wire around the hydrangea stems.  I wanted to make sure they weren't going anywhere. 

Next, use the two smaller size buttons and brooches (and in my case, also hair pins) to fill in all of your holes.
After I had about 20 or so, I would wrap the floral tape around the stem again, and kept doing that until I had the bouquet filled to my satisfaction.

And this, is what I came up with....

In the end, I ended up using approximately 120 brooches and buttons. The pops of red are one of my favorite parts. My most favorite pieces are the *borrowed* brooches that I got from my fiance's mom's best friend, as well as my Brutus head. Special in their own ways.

The last thing that I did was take the huge "stem" and trim all of the floral wire so that it was the same size.

**ignore the paper towel holder for now-- that's gonna be a whole other post**

So there ya have it! I have the bouquet in a vase that I get to admire quite often. The bouquet still catches my eye all the time.
The next step will be the bouquet holder- so stay tuned for my plans on that!!!