In preparing for my daughter Emma’s wedding we decided to make it a family event as much as possible. This would include her old family, her new family, the in-laws, the out-laws, everyone she loved.

This wedding reception was to be very unique, I know people say that all the time when really they just come up with more bling and a different color, but this was going to be fairly different and so it would require a lot of handmade things, which also means time!

Emma doesn’t really like cut flowers and didn’t want any for the reception. So when researching she found button bouquets online. She loved them!! We learned a little about how to make them, ordered bulk buttons from buttonsgaloreandmore.com, and took a shot! I have to say that I have never been more pleased with an online order. We ordered these buttons in 4 colors, ivory, purple, blue and orange, yes this bride has bold taste. The buttons came in a variety of sizes and shades and even shapes and they were fabulous! You order them by the pound so it was anybody’s guess exactly how many buttons we needed or are in a pound, and we were also guessing how many buttons we really needed. We were going to make her bouquet, “flowers” for the tables, have some to toss on the tables and things like that. These were the absolute best bunch of buttons we could have asked for, so perfect!

So, we wanted to involve new and old family alike, so we decided to have a button party. We invited sisters, sisters in law, new mother in law, aunts, grandma’s, and we met at Kim’s house. We knew we needed at least 140 stems for the tables, 50-60 stems for Emma’s bouquet, about 30 stems for boutonnieres and then we were going to make bracelets for all the women involved. Really I thought it would take an hour to and hour and a half, wow was I wrong! But we had a great group of women and everyone pitched in and was quite willing to learn.

We dumped buttons out on the table, we broke out the floral wire, the floral tape and showed some pictures and everyone just took off. There was a lot of laughter and some great family stories, there was advice from all the women to Emma, there was just a great room full of love. Add to the party some great food provided by Kim and Diane and you have a great party. Some of us enjoyed the food more than the buttons! We worked for about 6 hours, it went quickly with all the fun, but by the time we were finished we were good and tired.

I’m going to show you how the stems and bouquet turned out but I will show you how we used the stems in another article. The boutonnieres turned out very well too! The bride did each one herself and was very pleased with how crafty she turned out to be. My sister in law Diane was our flower guru since she has had some experience. Maybe we could have figured it out for ourselves but it sure went easier and was a lot nicer to have someone who knew what she was doing to help us all out. 

I've left one of the best things for last, the cost! We did every single "flower", tables, brides bouquet, bridal party, everything for $48!!! It was a gigantic savings over flowers, and on our budget every penny counted. So buttons are also a highly cost effective way to go. I never dreamed when we started talking buttons what a huge savings they would be.

Whatever you do for a wedding involve everyone and make it a happy family event, that’s where memories are made and relationships built.  Besides as grandma used to say……many hands make light work!