Pretty Petals: My DIY rose petal aisle runner

theweddingsource.com

Having seen several photos of aisles completely covered in flower petals I swooned and fell in love. Here was my inspiration photo from theweddingsource.com

How can you not love that romantic floral carpet of pink to walk on?  Thinking of my options it became quite difficult to think of how I could do this.

I could purchase real fresh rose petals and scatter them, however I do not have a flower girl and would have to have them the entire ceremony.  Fresh rose petals are quite expensive.

I could purchase freeze dried rose petals and scatter them.  These are also expensive.  In order to get the coverage I wanted, it would be a lot of petals.

Other issues included blowing petals.  My ceremony is outside and they could fly everywhere, especially since I'm on the water.  Scattered petals will be a pain to clean up after.  My venue will either not allow or just really hate me for putting these down.

So what was I to do?  Well, I could get that pretty pink petal look on a smaller scale and be quite happy with it.  So I decided to do petals on either side of the aisle densely clumped together as my runner.  Fresh roses and freeze dried would cause the same issues as above, however fake petals glued down would not present the same issues.

Materials:
- lots of petals.  I decided on a 25ft. runner so that means 50ft total for both sides of the aisle.  I purchased most of my petals from dollar tree.  Each bag contains 100 petals. I bought 3 bags white petals and 5 or 6 bags pink petals.  I also purchased 3 boxes of 300 fushia/ hot pink petals from Jo-Ann fabric for $1.99 each.  They gave them to me for the price of the tiny boxes.  Ha! I win.  So 900 hot pink petals plus 300 white plus 500 pink is about 1700 - 1800 petals total.
- tulle ribbon.  I purchased 6" wide 100yard length ribbon at AC Moore for around $5 I think?
- Scissors
- Glue gun
- Glue sticks
- lots of free time
- flat rocks or thin tiles
- velcro

Instructions:

• Roll out your tulle to your desired length.  I wanted a 25 ft. runner so You would to 50ft, then fold in half and cut so your tulle is even lengths.
• I dumped all the boxes of petals into a trash bag and shook them up so they were mixed well.  This makes it much easier to get a variety of petal colors.
•  Lay out your tulle flat on a surface you will be working on.  If you are concerned about harming the surface underneath with hot glue, place something down to prevent burning or destroying your surface.  I worked on my linoleum floor, which was rather easy to pull glue off of after I was done.
• Start at the end of your tulle, placing a drop of glue on your petal and sticking down on the tulle.  Overlap petals in varying directions and layering up as you go.  The key to making it look realistic is the randomness of petals.  It might help to actually grab a handful of petals out of your bag and just drop them on the floor in a line.  This way you can visually see how petals would naturally fall.  Some are right side up, some upside down, some on top of others.  Try to match this randomness.
• Another key tip is to not glue down the whole petal, except on the tulle (bottom layer).  If you do they will all look squished.  You want to make them look light and airy.  As if they were freshly tossed onto the ground.
• Once you finish a runner, flip it over and place your velcro on the underside in long strips in varying places.
• Take your flat rocks or thin tiles and place the opposing piece of velcro on the top of them.
• Adhere your tulle runner to the rocks via the velcro and viola! you have a non-blowaway aisle runner.

The other nice thing about this is that you can easily remove the rocks/tiles after the ceremony and the aisle runner is easily rolled up to be stored away or moved to another location (aka inside my reception hall) where it will be used again.

I will say I am big into DIY, but DO NOT undertake this project unless you have the patience of a saint and lots of time.  It took me 3 days to do 1 25' section.  My back and neck really bothered me after doing this as well.  It's very time consuming and tiring.

It also makes a big mess.  The glue balls up constantly and you have to clean up little "pills" of glue all over, stuck on glue and fabric hairs from the petals.

Video of How-To construct your Petal Aisle Runner