Photo by seven14 photography
What the bouquet ended up looking like.
Something borrowed, something blue
By JAMMIE SALAGUBANG – Buzz Editor
In an effort to cut down costs for my wedding, I decided to do a lot of DIY (Do It Yourself) projects. Why not? I thought. I like working with my hands, I wander Michaels’ aisles for fun and I own a glue gun (two, in fact).
However, I’ve discovered DIY also justly stands for ‘Daming Inis Yata (Tagalog for “a lot of irritation, after all.”)
I want a brooch bouquet for my bridal bouquet: They’re pretty, they last forever and most importantly, they’re sparkly (I have a raccoon’s fascination for shiny objects). They are also prohibitively expensive if done by professionals.
I looked up a tutorial on how to make them, and while the project did seem like it would take up quite a bit of time, it didn’t seem that hard. And my mother already had quite a collection of gold brooches.
Aha, I thought with glee, my something borrowed!
I gathered my mom’s brooches and some I had already collected and did a mock-up of my bouquet. I showed it to my man, who then pronounced:
“It looks like something from a Taiwanese junk shop.”
I was a bit put-out, but not defeated. The answer lay, I thought, in procuring more brooches. No problem, I thought, I live in the heart of thrift and antique stores. Finding gold brooches will be a snap!
Or so I thought.
My weekends were spent haunting thrift stores, waiting and hoping for that big shipment filled with sparkling and untold treasures that I just knew would come in someday, if only people would do their spring cleaning already.
Alas, I never did find the mother lode, and had to painstakingly gather them in bits and pieces (the process is still ongoing after two months.)
Like all truly irritating episodes, this one does not seem to have an end. Besides finding the pieces, I have to clean, wire, and wrap them with floral tape. Moreover, color, size, depth, fit and proportion all have to be considered when putting together the bouquet, which itself is an unwieldy process. And it weighs a ton.
Sigh. Turns out I’m the something blue.
Jammie Karlman is the entertainment editor for the Chico Enterprise-Record. Contact her at buzz@chicoer.com. Follow her on Twitter @JammieKarlman
I don’t know what your man was talking about.
Indeed. Though to be fair, its first incarnation was a bit scraggly…