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Thinking of putting together a brooch bouquet for your wedding, but not sure where to get all the brooches? Or maybe you want a sweet way to incorporate all your friends into your wedding? You can do both if you ask your friends to gift you brooches for your wedding shower! You can either give them a color scheme to stick to, like the silver shiny brooches pictured above, or let your friends choose ones that are most meaningful to them.
A crowdsourced brooch bouquet is a totally sweet way to incorporate all of your loved ones into your wedding day.
About the Author: Megan Finley Horowitz
When Megan's not writing, traveling, and sleeping, she's eating like the fate of the world depends on it. (You're welcome, world!) You can snoop into her personal life over on her website The Dash and Dine!
I love this idea, and am actually doing it in reverse for our wedding. We’ve got a year to go still so I’m in the process of collecting vintage brooches and earrings that remind me of my nearest and dearest lady friends. During the reception I plan on disassembling the bouquet bit by bit as I catch up with everyone and giving them “their” piece of jewelry.
This sounds like a wonderful idea and I love the sentiment. Just make sure you play with it beforehand to make sure you can pull it apart easily on the day.
We made a brooch bouquet ourselves. We twisted a thin gauge of wire around the brooch back, then twisted that in with a longer thicker wire to make the ‘stem’, and then taped the stems together and wrapped it in ribbon. We used almost all vintage brooches, which have fairly thin and delicate clasps. What I found is a good number of the clasps backs broke when I was attempting to wrap the thin wire around them, and get the brooch secure enough it would hold its position in the bouquet. Also to pull to untwist the wires from each brooch would be a difficult and fiddly job, and you’d need pliers, tweezers etc I found the reception went really quick, and I hardly got time to talk to half of the people I wanted to as it was!
Are you doing thank you cards after the wedding? An option that might be less stressfull is including the brooches and earings with your thank you cards when you send them out? That way you can take your time deconstructing it while watching TV with your new husband/wife 🙂
That is exactly what I did. Sorta. I bought grab bags from antique malls and thrift shops for the majority of “space filler” brooches, but I sent the word out to friends and family that I was in need of without totally blowing the cover of my idea (I wanted it to be a sparkly awesome surprise!). I definitely got a ton of special brooches in my bouquet now that makes me cherish the hard work and effort it took me to build it even more.
This is a lovely idea. Also, something I think Offbeat Brides would really love… A company that makes brooch bouquets, they also spray paint small figurines, buttons, etc and put them on. One bridesmaid bouquet had a small batman figurine on it because she loved comics (it blended right in with everything and just looked like a regular brooch bouquet). It was really cool and a great way to make it even more unique!
This is exactly what I did for my wedding! I borrowed brooches from all the women in my family and some women from my husband’s family and brought them all together in my bouquet. It was really nice, because I got some from women who couldn’t attend my wedding as well as special women in my life who had passed away. So I felt like even though they weren’t there in body, they were still with me on my wedding day. I had brooches from four generations!! It was beautiful. I didn’t have a color scheme, and after the wedding, it was like a sand painting, it blew back to where they came from. I got to keep a few as cherished heirlooms (some from my grandmother and great grandmother), but otherwise, they all went back to their owners!
I’d love to see a picture of the bouquet! Anybody have one I can look at to get a feel for the finished product?
SOOOO many gorgeous brooch bouquets in our archive:
http://offbeatwed.com/tag/brooch-bouquet
I am trying to put this together for my wedding but I am struggling with how to word my request to my family and friends. Any ideas on a polite way to request brooches?
Ask your maid of honor to put it as an option for the shower. I’ve found that people have LOVED to contribute to my bouquet. My Dad picks them up @ yard sales, my coworkers send them to my through interoffice mail, it’s nuts! Once people heard about it, they’ve been on the lookout for stuff for me, I have so much extras I don’t know what to do w/ them all! Good luck!
I so wanted to do this for my brooch bouquet! But my sister didn’t think it was a good idea. *sad*
And unfortunately I wasn’t able to incorporate baking sheets or towels (that I did get as shower gifts) into my bouquet…
I was happy to get some from my mom and a couple of aunts who knew what I was up to, though…
Make sure to find the thickest gauge wire you can feasibly work with and then leave plenty of time to play with it. The older brooches are heavy and hard to keep on there. Try to keep the heavier ones in the center to help with brooch shift! My mom made mine with brooches from my maternal family members’ jewelry including back two generations. I have it in a beauty and the beast style display in my house.