DIY Wedding Crafts - Origami Flower Bouquets

Wanting to keep everything under budget, we decided to make all of the flowers for our wedding.  In addition, this was a great way to incorporate our Nikkei culture into the wedding - through origami.  An added bonus was that all of our flowers would last forever.  My bouquet is currently displayed in our family room!

I originally got inspiration from here http://www.capitolromance.com/2011/09/21/diy-how-to-origami-paper-flower-bouquet/  But, I wanted to change it a little, to match the colors or our wedding, and to create a little more space between flowers.  2 sizes of origami flowers were used for the bouquets.  We used regular printer paper (in different colors), free Japanese papers (from my old job, or from the local Japanese grocery store), and leftover Washi paper (from making our wedding invitations).

Each flower had a toothpick hot glued in the bottom/center.  This helped keep the flowers together.  And, this was how I stuck the flowers into a styrofoam ball (I snapped the toothpicks in half, so they would not be as long.  Also, I added hot glue to the hole I poked the toothpick in, in order to help keep the flowers in).  A larger styrofoam ball was used for the bride's bouquet. To fill in little gaps between flowers, I glued both ends of a strip of paper to a toothpick, and stuck it in the styrofoam.
 
For the handles, disposable wooden chopsticks were bunched together - then ribbon was wrapped around them.  This was also hot glued and poked into the styrofoam ball, in order to hold it together.  For the flowergirl's bouquet, I glued a ribbon holder on the top, instead of using wooden chopsticks.

Here are a few pictures:

This is the bride's bouquet.

 Photographed by Quinn Photography

Photographed by Quinn Photography

Here are a couple of the bridesmaids' bouquets (Sorry they are a little blurry - the camera focus was on the bridesmaids' faces).

Photographed by Quinn Photography (but cropped by the bride)

Photographed by Quinn Photography (but cropped by the bride)

Here are a couple pictures of the flowergirl's bouquet.

 Photographed by Quinn Photography (but cropped by the bride)

Photographed by Quinn Photography (but cropped by the bride)