Completed kanzashi bouquet!

I have done it!

I have a rose bouquet and I love it.

This bouquet just has roses but I could have easily used other flowers which I will do next week I think but I will have to fit it in with making stock for an upcoming event called The Fine and Dandy Market at Crescent Arts Centre in Belfast.

This lovely bouquet will cost £150 and will be made-to-order as usual.  So if you are a bride and would like your own rose bouquet then let me know!

Kanzashi Update

Hello my followers ^_^

If you have been worried that I have forgotten all about tsumami kanzashi then let me reassure you that I have not.

In fact I have been doing a lot of product development and here are the work in progress photos.

Lots of roses and for what you may ask.

Well to make a lovely bouquet.  I always wanted to make a rose bouquet as the real thing are so pretty and I wanted to create a tsumami version.  Each rose used 15 squares of white cotton lawn as I wanted the rose to have that lovely soft look you get from real roses.  Then I estimated I needed 19 roses to make my bouquet so after cutting, folding, and gluing 285 fabric squares which took two days to complete I finally had all the roses.  To my surprise, I actually only needed 17 roses for the bouquet so I have two extra flowers to use to make a kanzashi or maybe a boutonnière.

I still need to decorate the underside of the bouquet but that is my task for today.

Kanzashi bouquet - part 3

As soon as I have started a bouquet I get crafter's block!

Last week I had this in my hand.

It was pretty but it need something else.......maybe more flowers and made in a different colour as well.

Well I settled for teal because it is the one colour that went well with the dark navy blue that I had.  Then my mind went blank!

How was I going to decorate the bottom of the bouquet?  I didn't want to use lace as I didn't want to introduce another fabric into the bouquet and I really wanted to use the same white organza that I used to make the little dainty white flowers.  But how was I going to do it?

This sat in my mind for 3 days and it was very annoying.  I want it to be light and fluffy to contrast against the bold kiku that I made but everything I tried just didn't work for me.  Not fluffy and stiff enough for my liking but then yesterday it struck me!  Why not try some musubi folding techniques?

I spent so much time learning how to tie my obi that something must be suitable for finishing my bouquet and it came to me, make a series of round petal folds with the organza and voila!  

Well I am glad to report that it worked and here is the result.

I rearranged the original bouquet I found the rotational symmetry was not pleasing to the eye.  Normally a certain amount of symmetry is attractive but since all the flowers I made are all symmetric, I didn't want the bouquet arrangement to be the same.

A little bit of asymmetry adds a little bit of excitement.

I am also happy with the size as well, it is a nice round bouquet which will sit nicely in a bride's hands.

Here you can see how the organza round petals nestle the bouquet.  It makes the bouquet look softer.

And I can't resist a closeup of the flowers.  

This bouquet will be appearing in my etsy shop very soon and it is a truly one off piece. The chances of finding another scarf like this one is going to be impossible so whoever buys it will be acquiring a unique kanzashi bouquet.  I think I will be pricing it around the $300 if you are interested.

Kanzashi bouquet - part two

I have the main flowers for the bouquet but I need something else to fill in the gaps.

How about some little flowers!

They are not made using the tsumami technique because I wanted to add a little bit of "fluff" to the bouquet so I made pom-pom style flowers.

I tried to take a picture to show how large the bouquet is relative to my hand but unfortunately it didn't quite work out.  I had my hand spread out to support the kiku on the edge.

Now to think about adding a layer of leaf like creation along the bottom to set it off.  What should I do?

Kanzashi Bouquet

So tsumami kanzashi are synonymous with making flowers therefore the next stage in kanzashi making is always making bouquets.

Now this is not a new thing for me.  I made one for my own wedding just over a year ago.

Well I have been meaning to make another bouquet for a while because they are very pretty and I am a sucker for things that are pretty.

But what material to use?  

Then it dawned on me what to use.  A couple of years ago I went to a vintage kilo sale and brought 5-6 scarves for the purpose of making kanzashi from them.  How about making a unique bouquet from one of those scarves?  

So the scarf I choice a navy blue and cream dotty one.  

I was a little bit eager with the rotary blade so I forgot to take a picture of the original scarf but the black and white one shows you the size of the one I used.

Now I had to decided on the the type of flower to make.  Normally I make medium size five petal flowers but this time I wanted to go all out and make kiku or crysthanamum.  However not one large but seven little ones!

I had to find out what the seven kiku look like so I make a casually arranged them into a bouquet to see what they look like.  The look very pretty!

With some extra white flower and accents this will turn into a lovely unique bouquet!

Here is a closeup of one of the flowers.