For another site to check, Afloral.com has a nice selection, too, of assorted flower stems. Check this page: http://www.afloral.com/subcatmfgprod.asp...
· Dried flowers - if doing a rose bouquet, you will need plumose fern (very delicate fern) as the backing and white or beige baby's breath or galaxy gyp as the filler to compliment the roses. The baby's breath and gyp will go well with the darker colored roses, reds, deep reds, burgundy, and lavenders but with the lighter pinks and yellows you can add a little something to compliment the paler colored roses besides the baby's breath or gpy. I use straw flowers. They're wee tiny flowers and you can place them "here and there" throughout the bouquet for effect. Additional dried flowers would include any spring bud such as snapdragons (so pretty), salvia, heather, caspia and avena (my favorite); any dried flower is up for grabs when making the spring bouquet. At Naturalnature.com you'll get an idea of the types of dried flowers available. Be sure to check the links for flowers, field flowers and grasses. Click: http://www.natural-nature.com/index.html
· Tissue paper - what is a bouquet without the colorful tissue paper they're wrapped in? For my birthday bouquet, my niece was very creative and used bright lime green tissue overlapped with brilliant orange tissue paper. The color combination set off the fresh flowers to a tee. Try using dark colors and light. Example, for a lavender rose bouquet, use a sheet of deep purple paper layered with pale lavender and cream tissue paper. When you fold back the tissue around the flowers, you should see a rainbow of colors. Very striking!
· Ribbon - you will need this to secure the bouquet. So, depending on the tissue paper color choose ribbon colors accordingly.
· Miscellaneous - craft scissors to snip the stems and a couple of rubber bands to secure the flowers at the base (you can substitute a bit of ribbon for this if the flower stems are too fragile).
Now, all you have to do is lay out the tissue paper and start placing your flowers. Start with the fern because it is the backdrop (use the fern for both the rose bouquet and the spring flower bouquet).
Start placing the roses or silk flowers, baby's breath or other long stemmed filler flowers first. For the spring bouquet, disperse the flowers so that you're creating a rainbow of colors, not all clumped together.
There really is no exact way to do this. These bouquets are strictly "visual" from the crafters point of view, so go forth, and create!
