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Flowers!
May 28, 2009
Right, onto the flowers. We decided to do the flowers ourselves really early on, because my bridemaid Jess got married before us, and she did them herself and they looked great. Also it is all about priorities, and spending mega bucks on flowers really didn't sit well with us!
We (and Jess) got our flowers from flowers 4 florists. I would recommend them to anyone - they offer a fantastic service. They have a minimum order, so we ended up having to get a few more flowers than we needed. But we only spent £175 in total so it really wasn't that bad! We went into a florists 2 weeks before the wedding, and asked how much for a small bouquet of roses, and were quoted £80, which almost made me wet myself with shock. I have no idea why it was that much - perhaps the W word?
We ordered Sweet Avalanche roses for my bouquet and the buttonholes:
Two kinds of gerbera (Pinky Eye and White Grizzly) for the bridemaids bouquets and the tables:
And also Biarritz and Feeling Green crysanths to add to the bridesmaids bouquets:
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I don't know much about flowers - I thought that the crysanths would be one flower per stem, but they were in bunches, with about 5 flowers on each - so we ended up with 20 bunches of each colour rather than 20 individual flowers! Oops!
The flowers arrived in massive boxes, and it took me about 2 hours to unpack the lot, trim the stems and put them in water. They came a couple of days early so they have time to open up nicely before the wedding.
We drove them to the venue in big buckets, and made the table vases on the afternoon before. It was easy, we just trimmed the stems and put one or two in each vase.
The next morning, I had the bridesmaids assembled in plenty of time, and we jointly made the buttonholes and bouquets while everyone tried to calm me down! I would have been even more crazy if I didn't have anything to do though!
There was a lot of laughing and no one knew what they were doing - it was brilliant!
I found some very helpful videos on the internet, and then bought some floristry supplies from a cheap website.
Video instructions on how to make a buttonhole are here.
And on how to make a bridal bouquet here.
This is when I was trying to tell people what I had learned from the internet about buttonholes, and Alison is leaning in concentrating as though she is going to learn valuable information from a hysterical bride who had only picked up floristry as a hobby that morning:
The buttonholes came out fine, we made extras in case any were a bit too amateur! The bouquets were just bunches of flowers, with mine arranged as much like a ball shape as possible, tied with ribbon, and the ribbon wrapped round and pinned with pearl headed pins.
Bridesmaids bouquets:
My bouquet:
Us with our flowers:
As with everything else, it was mildly stressful but definitely I would recommend it. We could probably have saved even more money by getting supermarket flowers, but I really wanted a big bouquet of proper roses. Also making the flowers in the morning really was superb fun!
Evidence of fun:
Posted by jen at May 28, 2009 12:50 PM
Comments
What wonderful roses - your bouquet was so dreamy, and the perfect colour for your dress too. You are very brave to have taken on so much of your wedding preparations especially since you hadn't done floristry stuff before. The results are very, very lovely.
Posted by: Kay at May 29, 2009 09:22 AM
Fantastic job. I'm amazed at how beautiful everything you've done is! For my weedding (almost 40 years ago!), we used a local inexpensive florist & the roses started flling out of my bouquet at the reception! Turned out he had saved money by cutting them very short & putting the heads on thin dowels. I'm not sure how it saved him money (maybe because long stem roses are very expensive). Wish I'd had access to flowers then myself. I wanted a very simple bouquet like yours but no one would make it! They just refuse - saying it wasn't good enough for a wedding!
Posted by: Donna at May 29, 2009 08:44 PM