Kusudama Flower Bouquet Assembly

Materials:  4.6 squares of scrapbooking paper, buttons, 20 gauge white cloth stem wire

I've been VERY busy assembling Kusudama flowers for my sister's wedding.  My best guesstimate (that IS a technical term by the way! ) is that I'm going to need about 200 flowers for 1 bridal bouquet, 3 bridesmaids bouquets, and 3 flower girl baskets.  With 5 pedals per flower (which have to be folded separately) that's about 1,000 individual pedals.  So, back to the first sentence . . . I've been VERY busy assembling Kusudama flowers for my sister's wedding.

For practice, I've decided to make some bouquets for my dinner table for Easter.

Here are the flowers that I've already assembled for this project.  I don't feel that the pictures do them any justice.  I am so happy with how they've turned out!!  The scrapbooking paper I used had beautiful designs all over it and I love the way that it showed up in the flowers.

Using these 2 websites I've easily learned how to fold and assemble the actual flowers:
Origami Kusudama Flowers
Kusudama Tutorial

After I have the flowers made, I get the 20 gauge white cloth stem wire and wrap the end around a pair of needle nose pliers.  This made it easier for me to wrap the wire around the button.

I thread the 20 gauge flower wire through the shank style button.

(NOTE: I chose the shank attachment style that way I could easily hide the flower wire)  Then I wrap the wire around itself so that it would be easier to tuck into the top of the flower.

Using a low heat hot glue gun, I first put some glue on the wire below the button and slid the wire down so that the button was resting on top where I wanted it. Then I added another small amount of glue to the bottom of the flower against the wire. I have seen a tutorial where she just applied glue to the bottom of the flower but I wanted to make sure that the button would stay where I wanted it.

Here's a single flower finished.

On a personal note: I decided to try buttons in place of beads (something that I've seen A LOT of other crafters use), for several reasons.  One was I wanted to be able to hide the stem wire, another was the options!!!  There are so many adorable buttons and I feel this allowed me another option to further customize a flower.  In the pictures below, if you look closely, you'll see that I used 2 different type of buttons.  One was the white pearl rabbit and the other are flowers.

Although all I've done here is assembled the flowers in a "vase" (hey, it was all I had that the opening was small enough to give me the look I wanted  :o)), for my sister's bridal flowers I will be making actual hand held bouquets.  I will also be making the bouquet tighter and adding some tulle as filler.  After the wedding in June, I will be sure to post pictures and directions on how I assembled them.

Check out this link (Very Basic Kusudama Bouquet) to see how I wrapped the stems for a hand held bouquet.

Follow this link here to see the Completed Kusudama Bridal Bouquets from my sister's wedding.

Thanks for looking!!
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(¸.•´ (¸.•` ¤ Jamie *´¨)