Recently brides have been exploring quirky ideas and the boundaries of floral style. Break conventions and strive for something unique on your special day by approaching floral arrangements in exciting ways, incorporating items, and preserving their arrangements as a keepsake. Here, Melbourne Wedding and Bride investigates design and style trends, explores how to incorporate materials, and investigates the sustainable side of unique arrangements to ignite your wildest bridal bouquet dreams.

Stylish By Design

For Answer creating bouquets is not just about creative expression; it’s a chance to tell her client’s story. “My favourite [bouquets] to work on are where clients give me loads of information in their questions and allow me to free reign to tell their story,” Answer explains.

Adopting an unstructured and slightly eclectic appeal, floral designers are able to create unusual bouquets that play with shape, colour, and texture. Personalising an intrinsic part of your wedding allows your story to blossom throughout your arrangement. By using arrangements to tell a story, brides can explore and experiment with a variety of styles. In recent years, Answer has seen lots of brides going for a rustic, unstructured, and whimsical look – “[It has] been a great opportunity to experiment with different materials and textures that I don’t normally get to use,” Answer affirms.

Nic’s Button Buds has also seen “a rise in neutral colours and textures and the mixing of different metal tones” in bouquets. Answer mentions these tones are easily achievable through the creation of artificial bouquets. For an original wedding design, contrasting space and colour is important, and Answer encourages couples to “mix tones throughout their wedding; it will give you texture, contrast and depth.”

If you’re looking for budget friendly bouquet, Answer suggests opting for a hoop, a single stem, or decorated accessories rather than large fresh bouquet. If you love the look of fresh flora, Answer recommends looking to flowers that are in season to ensure vivid colour and best price. To heighten contrast and add tone to your wedding, Answer

suggests “[keeping] florals to the bridal and cake tables, with alternative decorations for the guest tables.” This not only keeps costs down but creates a sense of elegance in the venue décor.

Bouquet Material

Integrating unexpected objects into their bouquets allows brides to do something different that may not be as easily achieved in a traditional arrangement. Answer believes, “If it can be put on wire, it can be integrated into a bouquet. This allows brides… to really do something different that may not be as easily achievable in a fresh flower or traditional artificial bouquet.”

For brides that want to incorporate an object into their bouquet, but aren’t sure if it fits their aesthetic or theme, Answer says there is always a way to integrate unconventional materials, such as “tucking them away where they are visible, but not a focal point”.

There really is no limit to what brides can integrate into their bouquets. Answer has used “everything from pieces of family jewellery to rocks, wood and even spark plugs in a bouquet.” Though, the most popular pieces are jewellery and fabric, sentimental or otherwise. Balancing the composition of the bouquet is a joy for Answer, who thinks of the process like a puzzle, only completed when the perfect balance is achieved. “Often, I can be found adding a removing things until the balance is ‘just right’.”

Answer finds the best materials come when her clients think outside the box for their dream= bouquet. A memorable piece for Answer was a wrap-handle that had a bride’s great-grandmother’s vintage leather glove hand-sewn onto the handle. Held by the bride down the aisle, it was as though she was holding her hand on her special day. Whilst this incorporation was a challenging piece – the result was a gorgeous bouquet with a beautiful meaning and sentimental attachment.

Reuse And Reinvent

Many brides want to keep their bridal arrangements, reinventing them as home décor, jewellery, or to pass on to their family members for their wedding day. Classic methods of bouquet