We had our ceremony in a courtyard of a hotel here in Ottawa. The reception venue was beautifully decorated and had these gorgeous chandeliers (these may have been one of the biggest selling points of the space) , the ceremony space had a really nice gazebo with tulle and orchid decorations. But the chairs we rented for our guests to sit on were pretty boring. So, I went looking for inexpensive ways to decorate the space. Since I would need some of our family to do the decorating the morning of the wedding, I was looking for something that would be quick and easy for them as I really didn’t want to bother anyone too much. That is where these ribbon roses came into play. I spent quite a long while making them the weeks leading up to the wedding (mostly because I wasn’t sure how many I would need and ended up making a ton of extras), but they were pretty easy to make and despite the few minor burns the hot glue gun gave my fingertips, they were pretty fun to make as well.
You could use these ribbon roses for so many different decorations, but I ended up sticking a bunch of them onto a loop of ribbon that then went over the aisle chairs to spruce up our ceremony location. It was just a little detail to add a pop of colour to our white chairs. You could also attach a few to a plain headband and use them for headpieces for your ladies or flowergirls, use them as part of your centrepieces or favours, or anything else you could think of.
To be honest, there are a hundred and one videos on Youtube of how to make various styles of ribbon roses/flowers. I searched for a while looking for the right style but more importantly for something I thought I would actually be able to do. I didn’t want to use one of the styles that involved burning the edges of the roses as I thought that would be too time consuming, and I didn’t want one of the styles that involved sewing as I really don’t like sewing. I opted for a quick and easy ribbon and glue gun style and it worked out really well for me.
Materials: Ribbon, glue gun, glue sticks
Directions: The process is pretty simple, but it can’t really be explained with text. So instead, I suggest you watch the below video. This is the one I used as my template for making the ribbon roses. I ended up making mine flatter that she did by gluing further up on the petals on the backside rather than always having them meet at the middle of the flower-back, but the overall process was the same.
I would like to thank my brother-in-law Jesse for the photos used in this post. I obviously didn’t take many photos from my own wedding so it was nice to have his photos to get another viewpoint of our day.
