How to make a crochet wedding flower bouquet

I know there are many different tutorials on how others have made their crochet wedding bouquet, but I thought I'd share mine anyway. First I saw the idea somewhere else and wanted to make one of my own. 

1. 

Make lots of crochet flowers. You could either go for a colour scheme or make flowers entirely from scraps. In the end the one for my maid of honor is made from scraps (because it suited her dress perfectly) and mine in colours that we used as a theme in the wedding.

After you have weaved in all the ends I glued (be sure to use transparent glue) small beads into each flower.

Here are some of the free patterns we used:

From Garnstudio:

- Geranium

-Rosa

Gosyo:

I used this one a lot, some times I skipped the last round to make some smaller ones too. I also used the leaves in this pattern a lot.

But you could always browse Ravelry to see other free flower patterns.

The other leaves were made from this book number 134 and 135,

 the 135 one is a bonus because it can double as a heart.

The book, by Heather Lodinsky

2. 

I then cut a styrofoam cone and sphere to fit like in the picture below. I then glued some fabric onto it because I did not want to be able to see that the bouquet was initially made of styrofoam. Since there was going to be another layer on top of the fabric I just rippet the fabric into strips and glued on so that the surface was smooth. My friend helped me with the next step after the glue had dried.

3. 

Then we cut some machine crocheted trims into strips as well and glued them on. Two on each side upwards to the end. 

You can see we are using a mug so that both hand were free to glue.

Before we reached the tip we did the last side bit so that the last strip around would cover the tip. 

4.

After we had glued trimming onto the cone and the cone had dried, we popped it into a tall glass for easy access and glued the leaves on. Because some of the leaves were a bit big we glued them onto the sphere instead of between the sphere and cone. We then added flowers. we started at the bottom and worked our way up. We made sure to pop a few of the smaller leaves in between.

5.

In the end we added a bow to both bouquets and we were good to go. We used an all purpose glue that the nice lady at Panduro recommended and everything stayed firmly in place throughout the entire day. I have seen some just pinning their flowers onto the styrofoam but I would be nervous about them staying on for the entire day, and if there is one day where one would hope everything went according to plan it is your wedding day so we used up our bottle of glue to make sure our flowers were securely in place. (Besides I would also be nervous some of the pins would drop and hurt anybody as I am a catastrophe thinker.)

I got lots of praise on my bouquet and at the moment it is lying on my doll house as a decoration and I smile as I walk past it.