Category: Interior Design

How to Preserve Your Wedding Bouquet

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DIY Dried Flower Frame

After months of planning your dream wedding, suddenly it’s over. All of the details you pined over for the past year waiting to be boxed up, thrown away or donated. Luckily for us DIY-ers, there are plenty of ways to reuse wedding décor, add a very personal touch to your home, AND get a daily reminder of your special day.

I’m all about memorabilia, and my bridal bouquet was something I definitely wanted to remember. I decided to try a couple different DIY projects to preserve the flowers: hanging a bridesmaid bouquet to dry and pressing my bridal bouquet flowers to create a DIY piece of art for our home. I am obsessed with how the framed flowers turned out and get to walk past it every day in my hallway!

What You’ll Need:
  • Kitchen scissors
  • Books
  • Paper
  • Large floating frame (The biggest I could find was 20×24)
  • Hot glue gun (I used a flower detail glue gun and it worked great)
  • Optional: vows printed on paper
  • Optional: ribbon from bouquet

Florals by Ahnalise Draper @gingerroots_ca

Disassemble Your Flowers

The day we got home from the wedding, I set to work on cutting flowers from my bouquet off each stem. I cut most of them to ensure I had plenty for the frame. In retrospect, I would have let them dry out a for a couple more days.

Thicker flowers like roses can be cut in half or you can pull out as much of the center green part as you can to spread it out in a circle. I ended up liking the round ones best after they dried.

Dry Your Favorites

Place flowers between two sheets of parchment paper and squash down inside a book. After you’ve gotten all of your flowers inside of books, pile them in stacks in a closet or other dark space. Add some heavy books on top to weigh them down more. After at least two weeks of drying, you can gently take out your flowers.

  • Blue thistle surprisingly dried perfectly in its full form, although I did try cutting them in half as well.
  • Carnations ended up not looking so pretty, so I used them underneath other flowers to add texture.
  • Peonies kept the most color, especially the pink one in my bouquet, which turned out to be a pale shade of purple when dried.
  • Snapdragons turned out great and I wish I had dried more!
  • Greenery and wax flowers made for nice borders around the vows sheets and other flowers.

NOTE: Make sure to let them dry out for a couple days before pressing them. I pressed them right away when they still had water in them so some of the larger flowers, like the roses, ended up ruining pages in my books and molded a bit during their time in the closet.

Arrange & Glue

Now comes the fun part and probably the toughest, since your flowers will be fully preserved (AKA not moving) once you glue everything down. I printed our vows on paper that looked like wood to go along with our rustic wedding theme and placed the flowers around them. You can also incorporate other flat items, such as the ribbon from your bouquet.

Cheers Claudette 2

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Office Space Complete!

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Our apartment living room is shaped like a big L and it’s HUGE, so we were able to set up a little desk area in the smaller part of the L, behind the couch. We pieced our “office” together over the first couple months of living here, starting with a new desk and propping my old bookcase vertically.

However, we couldn’t find a chair that worked. We wanted something cozy and unique, and thought a cute upholstered dining table chair could work. Turns out, those are typically too short for desks since you don’t have the ability to adjust them.

Luckily, I was able to use my new Home Decor Cheat Sheets book to figure out the kind of chair that could work. Since it goes through all of the basics of interior design and what things are called, I know it’ll be extremely useful when we buy a house and tackle some remodeling.

After a few months of searching, we finally found the perfect chair and I was finally able to bring our windsor chair back to its proper spot at the head of the dining table.

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Desk – World Market

Chair – Wayfair

Rug – Joss & Main

Bookcase – Ikea

File holder – TJ Maxx

Globe – Target

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ClaudettesCorner

DIY Hanging Tissue Pom Poms Video Tutorial

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Fair warning, these are easy to make but take longer than you might expect…especially when you’re making over 20 of them. BUT, they are a super fun and cheap way to bring the party to your living room. I wanted various colors, shapes and lengths to create depth, but you can really make them however you want!

Supplies:

  • Tissue paper stack cut in half (10 sheets per pom pom)
  • Ribbon
  • Scissors

Instructions:

  1. Place 10 sheets of tissue paper on top of each other. Cut in half. I tried a couple ways of cutting them – in half and 2/3 to 1/3 to create one big and one small. Small ones are hardest to make and the large ones droop too much for my tastes.
  2. Fold like an accordion with 1 /2 inch of space in between – backwards and forwards.
  3. Once completely folded up, cut the edges – you can either round the tips or cut into a V.
  4. Cut a long piece of ribbon and tie one end in a knot around the center of the folded up tissue accordion. This keeps everything in place but also gives you something to hang the pom pom up with.
  5. Pull one side of the accordion open like a fan and lay it flat on the ground.
  6. Carefully unfold and fluff each piece of tissue so it forms a ball.
  7. Once each piece is pulled apart, you can pull pieces towards and away from the string and the other tissue as needed.

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*Check out my other DIY projects*

 

ClaudettesCorner

DIY Copper Vases Using Beer & Wine Bottles

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So, I’m obsessed with copper. And beer & wine.

Old bottles + copper paint = rustic sophistication.

I made these vases for our engagement party a couple weeks ago and even keep them to use in the future since they turned out so well.

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Supplies:

  • Beer and wine bottles
  • Metallic copper spray paint
  • Matte finish protective spray
  • Wild flowers

Instructions:

  1. Peel off wine and beer labels
  2. Scrape off the leftovers by soaking in warm water
  3. Spray with copper spray paint and let dry
  4. Spray with matte finish to keep from chipping

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*Check out my other DIY projects*

 

ClaudettesCorner

DIY Shabby Chic Furniture: How to make a dresser look distressed

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My grandma gave me this dresser when I moved into my first apartment in college. After two good years of use, I decided to update it when I moved to San Diego. I was really into the whole “shabby chic” thing at the time so my roommate and I wanted to try out the look and extend it throughout our apartment.

I unfortunately did not take a photo of this dresser beforehand, but it was a dark amber wood and looked very 70s. Tying it in with the shabby chic theme was relatively easy – just a white coat of primer and then a shade of gray on top.

Antiquing/Distressing

To get the antique look, paint a section and then use the brush backwards to pull out some of the white. So, instead of just painting left to right with the bristles pointing to the left, keep the bristles facing left and push the brush right to left. This gives the paint a distressed look.

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For more DIY projects, click here.

 

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