One of my very good friends got married on the August bank holiday weekend, and I had the honour of being one of her bridesmaids! This was my first time ever being a bridesmaid, and it was a lot a lot a lot of fun!
While I can in no way claim to have a detailed record of all the work that went into the nuptial shindig, I did help with a few of the creative bits – so I thought I’d share some of them here!
One of the most fun aspects were the handmade origami bouquets. A group of us went round to the bride’s house for an evening of pizza, wine and paper-folding. While initially we were all pretty sceptical about our origami abilities, we soon warmed up to the task.
Each bouquet had three purple flowers, three yellow flowers, and three leaf-groups. If I’ve done the maths correctly, that meant a total of 39 petals per bouquet – multiplied by four bouquets makes 156 in total.
Once they were all made, we arranged them into the 5-petal flowers and stuck them together with PVA and sticky microdots. Then, the purple ones were mounted onto some ribbon-covered dowling and doused in more PVA for good measure.
It was a delicate drying process, with methods including wine bottles, frying pans and curtain rails…
Meanwhile the yellow ones and leaves were glued into a kind of crown with a hole in the middle, which the dowling would later go through to form the full bouquet.
But the final results were pretty amazing! And definitely long-lasting – mine survived the wedding, the after-party, and the train ride home, to now sit proudly in a vase in the living room, and be the only flowers in my house that don't lament my lack of horticultural ability!
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I used another of my creative skills in exchange for another meal at Hen’s house later – calligraphy. If that’s what you can call a combination of neat handwriting and knowledge of swirly computer-style fonts. Which I am.
We came to a mutual agreement whereby lasagne and homemade ice cream was exchanged for table names.
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The final bit of tinkering was actually a few amendments I made to the beautiful bridesmaids dresses. I added a few stitches into the crossover v-neck, as a precaution against ceilidh-induced bouncing, and also moved the button on the back of the dress, to improve the fit across my narrow shoulders.
Et voilà! What a day it was! Much fun was had by all concerned, there were no imminent disasters – and everyone resisted the temptation to shout “I object” at an inappropriate moment. Hurrah!
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