Vintage Diva: May 2012

Here is my brooch collection

Well , firstly collect all the brooches you can get your hands on.......try asking family members to each buy one for you, then you can take part of your family down the aisle with you......well you can tell them that and they will go all gushy and rush to buy you one.

I bought a lot of mine from Ebay and charity shops. I set my price and swore I would never pay more than £5 for a brooch....and I kept to it too.

I collected approx 70 brooches in total, and I thought it might look nice, AND cover up any mess ups if I added some tiny silk flowers in case there were gaps. maybe some behind the bouquet, and inbetween the brooches. I'll see if it needs it'

My list of things i needed were:

70+ Brooches......(ear-rings, rings and pendants work fine too)
Florist wires. (I bought 20 inch fairly thick wire, to double up (ie 10 inches when done)
Wire cutters
White gypsolphela silk flowers for filling in gaps (possibly)
Tape 2 inch wide......for handle
Satin Ribbon for the handle
That's it!

Step One...Wiring The Brooches

I used quite stiff wires for stability, some brooches were small and only needed one wire, the larger brooches needed 2 wires to stop them rocking about. i used my wire cutters and pinchers a lot too;

Here is one of the brooches wired

And here are the finished wired brooches.
it took me approx 4 hours in total. over 2-3 nights watching TV, very relaxing but made my thumbs very sore!
i actually decided only to use 50 of the 70 i had collected. because 3-4 i broke whilst wiring, and the others i didnt really fancy once i had them against the rest of them, plus its getting big & heavy so i think this collection of 50 will do nicely. it's about 8 inches in circumfrance, so thats big enough i think. it weighs about 1 kilo at the minute i think!

Step 2. making Small Bunches...

I found it easier to bunch 4-5 brooches together, as there were so many that they would move around, so I made 9 small bunches to make it easier . I used duct tape, not special florist wire, I figured that it was all going to be covered up anyway, and I didnt have florist wire, but I DID have duct tape. It worked very well anyway.

Just this duct tape is all i used, 99p from anywhere....

Here is one of the small bunches I made...

And here are all the bunches ....ready to be put together

Step 3.........Building up the Bouquet

Now that i only had 9 small bunches to contend with, it was much easier to handle, now it was time to build the bouquet,

And here is what it looked like.......

I bought some silk flowers just in case i needed to cover up any messes, and i didnt make a mess, but i still thought that this bouquet needed something, so i added the flowers areound the outer edge, and i think it finishes it off nicely to be honest, i think it makes the edges look neater. it measures 8 inches and weighs 1.5 kilo's.

i bought 3 stems of these, each stem had 2 blooms on them, this was all it needed, and they cost less than £1 per stem.

Now all I had to do is cover the handle with ribbon and its done.
Step 4 Making The Handle
I used 2 metres of 2 inch wide ribbon to wrap the handle, and added a diamante heart.... then i added some gold accented 1/4 inch ribbon in a braid pattern over the top.

So its finished!
And i had lots of fun making this bouquet.....it was a daunting task, but it was extremley easy to do,and I am very happy with how it turned out....