I haven’t posted any wedding projects lately, but ‘tis the season for weddings, so I’m starting back up with ideas from our wedding last summer.

For over a decade my mother and I have been making button flowers by layering buttons of different colors and textures on floral wire and wrapping the wire with floral tape—simple. Our inspiration for button flowers came from some we found in Seattle more than 15 years ago. The original version was just a single button on wire; we adapted the idea and made them our own. Encouraging our project, my grandmother gave us her vast collection of buttons, collected over decades and carefully sorted by color. (Repurposing! Sustainable arrangements!)

As soon as I began thinking about our wedding last spring, I knew I wanted a button flower bouquet; it was my first idea for making our wedding more unique and “us.” Not only would I have a bouquet that would suit my style, it was a bouquet I could keep forever without it withering and turning dingy (as happens with so many flower bouquets that are dried).

I decided on all white and cream buttons along with a few with rhinestones to add some sparkle. My mom started making button flowers for me as soon as I mentioned the idea (she has the button collection). Soon, as I told people of the project, friends began handing me strings of white and cream buttons from their own collections, digging through the coffee cans of buttons handed down from their mothers and grandmothers.

On a visit to my parents’ Ethan and I sat down with my mom and my sister-in-law, who was also visiting at the time, and made button flowers until our fingers went numb (they really are easy and pain-free when you’re not making them in bulk). We made over 200 button flowers for the bouquet and more for boutonnières. All of the flowers are made from either two or three buttons, stacked and threaded on floral wire with a shank button in the center. The flowers matched the idea as I imagined exactly.

I ended up with the bouquet pictured above, and I think I will always love it. It contains buttons from my grandmother’s collection, and from at least a dozen good friends and my mother-in-law; my mother and husband made many of the flowers along with me: this bouquet is important to me, much more important than a traditional floral arrangement.

To finish off the bouquet, I arranged the flowers a bit, tied the stems with a cream ribbon, and added some pearl-head pins along the ribbon.

The one drawback of a bouquet made from approximately 500 buttons? It weighs over 8 pounds. It was not thrown at the reception. Actually, no bouquets were thrown; instead I made a paper flower bouquet and gave it to the woman present who had been a bride longest—a dear friend who has been married to her husband (also a dear friend) for 64 years—I hope to be so fortunate (and my bouquet will still be around!).
 

photo by Erika Ellis

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