Shell Wedding Bouquets

Now you know I have been dying to share all the details of our wedding. Yup. I am finally a Mrs! However, I so loved the way our photos came out by Ann Coen Photography, and am so proud of the hard DIY work we put in, that want to wait and see if I can get a wedding blog or magazine to feature our wedding. And they are kind of picky about those exclusivity clauses! Anyway, once I find out if we've been accepted or not, I will be sure to share all of the details.

But, that doesn't mean I can't start sharing some of the DIY projects we worked on for the wedding — and there are a lot. Between my mom, my sister and me, we pretty much DIY'd the entire shindig!  Starting with all of the invitations (engagement party, wedding, thank yous), we then tackled the table names, escort cards, signs, centerpieces, boutonnieres, flower girl basket, ring bearer sign, arbor and everything in between.

Today though I am going to show you the beautiful shell bouquets we made. These were so simple and very cheap. Much cheaper than going the flower route and perfect for our beachy wedding.

Aren't my bridesmaids gorgeous?

In the up close images of the bouquets above, you can see how mine differs a little from the bridesmaids. We used more pure white shells with mine and then added pops of color throughout. Theirs had more muted color shells. They also had turquoise ribbon wrapped around their driftwood handles to tie into the pops of turquoise from their necklaces and flower pins. Mine had cascading twine with shells on it that my mom had picked up on one of her many seashell shopping trips.

I originally found the idea on Pinterest, of course, and took pinspiration from several of the pins, but I mostly followed the tutorial for the one on top, below, which I found on Wedding Bee.

The top is me with my bridesmaids and our shell bouquets we made. The bottom row is pinspiration via here, here and here.

We used a Styrofoam ball purchased at Michael's, which come in a few sizes at varying prices. We figured styrofoam would help make the bouquets a bit lighter, but they were still definitely heavy. We joked we could club our hubbies with them!

We then started by gluing in the driftwood handles, which my mom had found while walking the beach on Long Beach Island. We used a lot of glue to make sure they were securely in place. I had nightmares about the shells balls falling off and rolling down the aisle! Thankfully, they held up well! The silly things us brides worry about!

Most of the shells were store bought, but a few on my bouquet were from some of the beach vacations me and the hubs had taken together. We mostly hot glued the shells of various shapes and sizes randomly around each ball. We did find though that starting with a few of the larger shells and then layering with smaller shells helped fill in the blank spaces the best.

For my bouquet, we also hot glued some shells to floral pins and stuck those in tiny crevices throughout to give it an even more layered look like the pinspiration images. We even tinkered around with adding some silk flowers like the Wedding Bee pinspiration (and pictured below on the right) but opted in the end to take those off for a more bridal (white) feel.

Here we are working away. It took the three of us a few hours to make four of them.

 I absolutely love the way they turned out. We received so many compliments on them. And the best part is, we each have a wonderful keepsake to remember the day since these can now easily be displayed in our homes, either on their own or perched in a vase.

Just a few more parting beauty shots...

Yes, that's my hubby. He's so handsome. I'm a very lucky girl!