the story so far: Since we were running off to get married at a Vegas chapel I was a little worried about what would happen with my stuff. I didn’t want to worry about where my iPhone was as we were saying vows, so I decided to make a bag shaped like a bouquet.

I started with this rather beat up evening bag I found at TJ Maxx for about $2. The sides are hard, and it’s skinny enough to hold like a bunch of flowers:

I didn’t have much time so I decided to make things as easy as possible for myself. Since my dress was a single color with raw edge fabric flowers I decided to make the bouquet similarly simple. I bought some inexpensive nylon/polyester lining fabric, some wide dark green grosgrain ribbon, a small round needlepoint frame to tack the flowers to and a bottle of Fabri-Tac fabric glue (love this stuff):

First I glued the ribbon to the bag. I started with the ends:

I trimmed them and glued them flat, it wrapped over the corners nicely:

I tucked and glued down the raw ends of the wide ribbon, then proceeded to simply glue it down over the surface of the bag. I was careful to only put it on the outside so the bag would still close properly:

It’s not all that nice when you see it up close:

I needed to cut some ribbon to fit around the bag’s snap closure:

And chose a narrower form of the same ribbon to cover the snap closure:

A detail of the end:

Since the flowers on my dress were raw edged and simple I decided to just rip the fabric into strips and gather tightly at one end. They curled themselves into a pretty nice shape and I just went with it:

(There were a lot more fussy versions of the flowers that came before these, some involved layers of tulle in the middles. But in the end the path of least resistance here worked well with the dress. Go figure.)

I covered the small plastic cross stitch frame with a little fabric, then tacked and glued four large flowers into place:

Then I glued and slip stitched the flowers to only one half of the top of the bag (so that it would still open). It worked really well:

I also made a simple boutonniere using the same materials. I cut a V of ribbon and carefully slip stitched it shut:

It was nice!

It wasn’t until we were packing that I realized it would be hard to get the bouquet to Vegas without crushing it. Luckily I had saved a wide mailing tube last year and the bouquet bag slid nicely into it, and the flowers emerged without being creased. Before going to the chapel we did have to stop by the Concierge desk and borrow some scissors to clip off the stray fibers that were coming out of the ripped edges of the flowers, but they weren’t a problem for the rest of the day. In the end the chapel wasn’t nearly as busy as I feared, and we didn’t end up getting married outside in the gazebo (it was 96 degrees outside!) so there was no need to worry about my things. Still, I really enjoyed having my bouquet bag with me and I’m glad I went through the trouble to make it. After the chapel we went to a few different spots in Vegas (more on this later) and it was really nice to just have my bouquet and a wrap and not have to worry about keeping track of an additional bag. I don’t think I could have gotten away with it anywhere but Vegas, though.