Wedding Flowers

One of my friends got married yesterday, which was very sweet and exciting. Although I have no experience doing wedding flowers, she enlisted my help since I know plants and have an eye for design. At first I wasn’t nervous because we were talking one casual bridal bouquet for a small, ten person ceremony. But as the wedding grew, my nerves mounted.

The final tally included one bridal bouquet, four bridesmaids bouquets, seven boutonnieres, one corsage and flowers for the cake/cupcake tiers. The wedding list hovered around fifty people. Thank goodness she is incredibly laid back because I was stressing myself out enough on my own. My own wedding flowers were gorgeous and I just didn’t want to screw hers up entirely.

I began the process by talking with the floral department at New Seasons about doing a bulk order on the flowers, which went okay. They were initially reluctant to extend a discount on my order, although I did get a discount after explaining I would be spending $200+. They also helped me price out ten different flower varieties so I could make a final decision. It seemed like a logical plan to play with a few different design combinations to make sure we could afford everything.

In the end, I purchased white roses, white freesia, blue delphinium, blue iris, and green hypericum berries.  So five flower combinations out of the ten I priced out. I found good basic instructions on the bouquets here and boutonnieres here. I picked all of the flowers up Wednesday night and left them out overnight to open a bit. Thursday, the roses went into the fridge in a water/flower-dope mixture so they would stay fresh. EVerything else same in buckets of cool water while I worked on assembling the arrangements. I took the day off work and started around 10am, finishing around 6pm, with a couple breaks along the way.

The final arrangements went in fresh water in the fridge overnight. The wedding was around noon Friday and the flowers went out of water and into the bridal party’s hands about an hour before the ceremony. The whole wedding was gorgeous, sweet, and very sincere. A number of people came up throughout the day to comment on how lovely the flowers were and I felt a huge sense of relief that they look like legitamit wedding flowers. I don’t think you would guess they were homemade and they all held up perfectly throughout the day.

This explains why I didn’t get my second post of the week up until today! I am not planning to go into the wedding flower business, but this experience made me feel confident I could do it again for another laid back friend down the road. And I still find it amazing that everything came out this beautiful! To anyone thinking about taking on this task for a friend, you can do it!