I have this idea for an elopement purse. It started with looking at pictures of happy wedded people on the website of the little chapel that we’ve chosen. In one picture there is a happy young bride clutching her bouquet, leaning in towards her husband and… with a purse hanging from one shoulder. After that I couldn’t stop thinking about what I was going to do with my stuff. I mean, it’s not like we’ll be there all alone, and I’m sure I could put down my stuff and it wouldn’t get stolen but still, I don’t want to be thinking about my stuff at the moment I’m getting married. My non-poofy dress means I cannot hide things underneath my skirts (I come from a theater background, nothing is sacred). I don’t really want to stash my things in Scott’s pockets and have to bug him every time I want to check my makeup.

So I came up with the idea to make a bouquet purse. Blue flowers to balance the blue shoes against the pale dress and my pale skin. I have seen a few versions of bouquet bags. There is of course the famous Lulu Guinness bouquet bag, seen above.

There are purses covered in flowers, the ones shown above are from Karen Tran Florals and the Fontanelli Rose Bouquet bag at Amazon. If I were going to go the handbag route I would have copied this bouquet bag by Blippia, seen on Flickr. Simple and bright.

And you can find examples of bridesmaids carrying floral pomanders that could easily be translated into a purse idea. (Images above from Here Comes the Guide and Michelle Rago.)

But I wanted something more traditional, something that wouldn’t hang, something I could clutch and would give me something to do with my hands. Suddenly having something to hold on to and hide behind seemed very important to me. I decided that what I really needed a fake bouquet that was hollow inside. I couldn’t find one so I decided to make one.

My first idea involved a long skinny makeup bag for the stems and a buckram hat form for the blooms. It seemed flimsy but doable. Then I found this rather beat up hard sided evening bag at a TJ Maxx for $2. It’s big enough to carry my iPhone, a powder compact and some tissues and small enough to hold in my hands. I’m going to wrap the body in green and blue ribbon, like you see the stems in bouquets often wrapped in ribbon. The top will be messy abstract flowers, like the ones on the dress, in shades of blue fabric.

I’ll attach the flowers to a small plastic frame meant for small cross stitch projects. The cross stitch canvas I will stitch and glue to the top of the purse on one side so that the bag will still open and close. I think it’ll work, and the women in the ribbon room at Nancy’s Sewing Basket where I spent a lot of time matching ribbon to the shoe I’d brought along all seemed to think my idea was charming even though I was clearly the one bringing the crazy that day.