I’ve been working on a custom wedding bouquet, and I’ve finally finished the first two  flowers for it – hot pink sweetheart roses, and orange dendrobium orchids! The bouquet has a tropical theme, and I’m excited about some of the flowers and foliage I’ll get to make for this project.

These rose petals were modeled after some yellow ones I made in a similar style a couple years ago for another bouquet. I just altered them a little bit and made them a little smaller.

“Sweetheart Rose” is a term for roses with a small flower head. These new pink ones I’ve made are about 2 1/4 inches wide. Because they are smaller roses, I made 11 total for the bouquet. I’m not sure if I will need them all yet. It’s hard to determine how many flowers you need for a bouquet when you’re trying to keep within a certain size range. So I might end up with some extras, but I don’t mind!

Buy PDF

I decided to take this chance to publish the pattern. So I whipped up some leaves to go with the roses. I’ve given this pattern an Intermediate difficulty rating. You’ll need to be familiar with Basic Frame, Reverse Wrap, Scallops, Extensions, and Lacing. You can purchase a copy of the pattern in my shop.

I’ve also made some Dendrobium Orchids for the bouquet as well. I’m still working on the pattern for this one because I don’t want to publish just the stem, but a full plant. And also a couple of shading patterns. I’m about half-way through with that venture, so hopefully this pattern will be up next month.

I’m planning on this bouquet being my very last custom order.

Recently I went back looking through some of my old patterns. Many of them I haven’t read in years and years. I’ve been publishing French Beaded Flower patterns for eight years now, and my style of writing and formatting patterns has changed a great deal from when I started. I’ve learned a lot about writing patterns since then. My photography in my patterns has also improved. They’re good designs, just an old writing style, so I feel like they still have a place in the beading world. I don’t have time in my life to go back and re-write them, or re-photograph them. Instead, I’ve just reduced the prices on some of the oldest ones.

Also, because I don’t have enough going on… (haha!) I’ve decided to start on a large personal project. This one will take a while to complete because it’s not my top priority. And I don’t plan on publishing a tutorial for it. But, I thought it would be fun to document the project in video form on my YouTube channel.

Come take a peek at what I’m making!