mani/pedis and a DIY rehearsal bouquet

The wedding weekend festivities began today around 4pm with manicures and pedicures with my mom and sisters.  We just went to this little oriental place by TJMaxx in Hoover, and the ladies there were all so nice. In their sweet oriental English they were asking Katie about her wedding and they did GREAT work.  We got pampered and it was so nice. 

Katie (the bride) and Emily

Mom and I waiting our turn. And no, we did not opt for the waxing ;)

Afterwards we helped Katie with some last minute shopping and then she headed home to pack for the honeymoon.

Tonight, as part of my maid of honor duty, I had to figure out how to make a bow/ribbon rehearsal bouquet.  I've never made one of these before, and it was a little bit harder than I expected.  I had a hard time figuring out how I was going to actually assemble it.  I did some poking around on the internet and read a few tips, and just went from there.

In short, this is basically what I did.
Supplies:

• ribbons and bows from various wedding showers
• 2 paper plates (or 1 decently sturdy one)
• scissors
• duct tape (luckily mine was white)
• a large safety pin

I started out by cutting a scalloped edge around the two paper plates, just to give them a more "elegant" appearance. Then I cut an "x" shape hole in the middle of the plates.  As you'll see, Katie had a TON of purple satin ribbon, and not so many bows.  This is because they only registered at Bed, Bath and Beyond, who only uses....you guessed it, purple ribbon for gift wrapping.  So, to create a large bow effect, I took strands of purple ribbons cut roughly 10" long and looped several of them in a circular shape to create the look of a large purple bow as my main background.  Here's the final product so you can see what I mean...

The purple "bow" is just individual strands fastened together in the middle with a safety pin.  After that I added the large tulle bow and ran a loop through the center of the paper plate to create the handle in the back.  I secured it with duct tape just so it wouldn't get pulled back through.

Then beyond that I just taped on some extra white and silver bows to fill in some gaps, and I tied the little flower detail to the center knot of ribbon.  Sorry that's probably the worst explanation of how I did this, but I seriously was just winging it the whole time.  You really can't mess this up. Just try to keep things centered when needed and balanced.  Oh, and I stapled some extra strands of ribbon and tulle to the bottom of the plate so that they hung down a bit at the bottom.  I was pleasantly surprised with how cute the final product turned out.  I might have given myself a little pat on the back  :)  Hope the bride likes it!