Instructions for assembling your own LED rose bouquet, including where to find all the necessary parts.
The best part about these is that you can easily remove the flowers from the LEDs for storage when you are done, or easily change out the flowers for more variety.
- LED lights, battery powered. (The ones I like the best are Fairy Lights, which are very popular in the UK, but a little harder to find in the US. In the end, I bought them from this vendor, via ebay.). They come in many colors, and a variety of sizes (different numbers of lights per string). I got the 35 light string set for the bride, and the 15 light string sets for the bridesmaids. I got the white light sets, because I want my flowers to add color to the bouquet, not the lights. (The title image is the 15 light string set, with 12 flowers on it, and the 3 extra lights hidden randomly in the bunch).
- Simulated rose petals. (I bought these in bulk from here. Comes out to a penny a petal, if you get enough other stuff from their cool website for free shipping, etc.) Many more colors available there.
- 5/16" ID (inner diameter) clear PVC tubing. Can be found at any hardware store. You will need about 1 to 1.5 inches of tubing per flower.
- Double stick tape. After trying other glues, I found this works best, and is cheap and easy to find most anywhere (craft stores, hardware stores, office supply stores).
- Green pipe cleaners. Available at any craft store.
Optional: Soldering helper. I find the 'extra hand' indispensible. You can use anything that will hold the tubing in place while you stick the petals on.
1. Cut a segment of PVC tubing about 1 to 1.5 inches long.
2. Hold segment of tubing in clamp.
3. Put double stick tape around section of tubing.
4. Attach petals to the tape(triangle edge at the bottom), go around slowly and evenly. You may have to hold the tops of the petals tightly near the tubing as you attach petals. I used 7 to 8 petals per flower.
5. Hold petals tightly to tubing, then remove from the clamp.
6. Tightly wrap the green pipe cleaner around the base to hold the flowers in place, and to give it a bit of a stem.
7. Slip your LED light thru the tubing to complete your flower.
Once you have assembled the desired number of flowers, it's time to gather them up and create the bouquet.
If you decide to have fewer flowers than lights, I recommend doubling up on lights on the darker colored flowers (for instance, putting 2 LEDs in the red flowers). To do this, I actually ended up using a larger diameter tubing (7/16" inner diameter) because it's much easier to squeeze the lights through.
Gather up all the flowers in your hand, then arrange them as desired. To keep this arrangement, firmly hold the flowers in place, then keep them tightly together with a large rubber band. You can use a ribbon, or other more attractive tying apparatus if preferred. Wrap the ribbon around the remainder of the cord, and incorporate the battery pack into the handle/cords, being careful to keep the on/off switch at the bottom, uncovered.
I used hot glue and full fake/silk roses, rather than individual petals!
Great idea! Sounds like that would be a lot faster, and quite beautiful!
Hey! I came across this some months back; I decided immediately that I would make it for my girlfriend for Valentine's Day. I purchased the equipment over the past month or so and assembled a bouquet over the past week or two. We celebrated a bit early this year, and she loved the bouquet. So, my thanks for this instructable! I found a few things I did differently. First, I trimmed down the first two or four petals on some of them so they'd be more even with the rest of the petals. This sometimes meant that I'd use up to ten petals, though. I suppose the double-sided tape I had was of lower quality, but I had a hard time getting the petals to stick individually. What I eventually did was rather tedious, but worked. I put a layer of tape down on the tube, then placed the first two petals, wrapped so they were close together (for a bit more realism). I then placed a layer of tape over the bases of the petals. I placed the next petals on that layer similarly and put another strand of tape over their bases, and so forth. Overall, it came together nicely.
What a strange coincidence, I was looking for some LED tealights yesterday morning and found a site that had various LED lights and a lot of bridal paraphernalia and I had a momentary thought "hey, how about putting LED's in bridal bouquets." So it's interesting to see that it's been done. I bet they will look great at the wedding.
Thanks! We're hoping the flowers will be enough to light our way thru the aisles, like floating balls of light wandering thru the crowd. Some of the floating LED tealights are really cool, best of luck!
Thanks. Best of luck with the date!