Time For A Change...

Well, as you all know, posting is pretty sparse around these parts. It's few and far between that I get a chance to craft and then post about it on this blog. I love doing this craft blog, but life gets in the way too often. As most of you know, I'm a teacher. A special education teacher. And, if any of you know any teachers you know that some days you come home too exhausted for much of anything, let alone crafting and blogging.

To no fault but my own, I created this blog about crafts. People come here to see crafts, not read about my life. And, while I'm not always crafting, my life is always going on. Things are happening, and I want to be able to share that with my friends and family, but I don't think that this is necessarily the place to do that.

So, I started a new blog with my husband. Life With The Luther's. I'll be posting about whatever tickles our fancy. Life, crafts, our never-ending task to fix up our house, and whatever else comes along. I will leave this blog up though for now. Thanks to pinterest, it still receives over 250 hits a day, which is awesome! I may post things on here, but I wouldn't count on it.

So, thanks for sharing in my blogging with me. If you want to visit us on our new blog, we'd love to have you!

See you around!

Rustic Wedding Flowers

So for the wedding I knew I wanted to have rustic looking flowers. Now, flowers can be VERY expensive! For our wedding on a budget, I knew I wouldn't be able to do big huge flower arrangements. So, I decided very early into our planning that I was going to DIY it! Why not, right? What could go wrong...

So first up was finding bouquet inspiration. I knew our bouquets needed to have Billy Balls in them, so I could bring in that mustard yellow color. If you haven't seen billy balls, or craspedia, before they are beautiful! They have a deep mustard color and the best thing about them in my opinion is that they just dry out when you're done with them. They don't brown or lose their color, so you can keep them in your house afterwards. So to google I went. And this is what I came up with.

I'm unsure of the source since I saved it to my computer. If you know where it's from let me know and I'll credit the photo.

Isn't it beautiful? It was absolutely the look I was going for. After some research I found out that the white flowers in the bouquet are balsa wood, and the little green/brown flowers are called scabiosa pods.

I needed to order all my flowers so I could do them myself. I found the balsa wood flowers on a really helpful site called save-on-crafts.com I used that site a ton in our planning process.I priced scabiosa pods and found they were a little more then I wanted to pay so I tried to look for something comparable in color and size and found these:

Balsa Wood Flowers 18/$3.99  Himalayan Thistle Roses 12/$3.99

Both of the ones I chose didn't have stems (because that made them cheaper!!) So I added stems by buying floral wire and pushing it through them and hot gluing them for extra support.

I ordered my billy balls from a local florist here in town.

Then it was time to assemble the bouquets. I couldn't do this until 2 days before the wedding since the billy balls were fresh at the time of purchase. It made it a little stressful since it was so close to the wedding and the only backup plan I had was that the girls would just carry a handful of billy balls down the aisle.

I grouped the bouquets how I liked them and then used floral tape to secure each one.

I made the girls' bouquets on the smaller size. I didn't want them to be huge, just small and dainty. I made my bouquet slightly bigger. 

For the stems I covered some in burlap and others in twine and just hot glued as I went. They held up very well throughout the night and still til this day.

I loved the colors. I think they turned out great and I was very happy I could save the money! 

Now for some wedding photos. For my Mom, Mother-In-Law, and Grandma I made them singed flower pins with mustard yellow satin and tulle. 

The flowers looked great with the girls.

They were perfect in size. 

I also made the groom's and groomsman's boutonnieres. I used billy balls and smaller balsa wood flowers also purchased from save-on-crafts.

So, if you're worried about DIY-ing your own flowers, don't be!! Just plan it out and don't be nervous, just go for it!