DIY Wedding Flowers

It’s been several months since our wedding but I wanted to share how I (me and my small army of help!) did my own flowers for the wedding.  I knew I wanted a casual approach to flowers.  My vision was fresh cut, lots of flowers, and random.  I wanted to use long tables and have little vases lining the tables with flowers.  I thought this would be an easy look to achieve and hopefully cheaper than hiring a florist to make elaborate table arrangements.  My original plan was to hire out my bouquet.

My Goal –  As stated above, my goal was to purchase flowers online, have them delivered to my house, transport them to Lafayette, and cut them the day before the weddings and “arrange” them in the small vases.

My Fears –  I felt like I should hire out my bouquet since I didn’t really want it to look “homemade” and I mean you only get married once, so I felt like I could justify purchasing this.  (Heavens knows my husband doesn’t believe in buying fresh flowers any other time of the year, so this was my one chance right?? Right.)

My Plan –  In the end, I decided to have my mom make the bouquet and didn’t hire anything out.  It still wasn’t cheap and we spent about $600 on flowers.  HOWEVER…I think I ended up with extra and could have pulled back my order a bit and the flowers I wanted the most (Peonies) were very expensive.  I ordered flowers from WholeBlossoms.com and SamsClub.com to arrive (per their website and type of flowers I had chose) on Thursday for a Saturday wedding.  What I could not have anticipated was that there would be a storm in Ecuador and this would delay some of the delivery.  I had not left room for this kind of delay since the flowers were to be delivered to Indy and I was planning to take them to Lafayette.  Thank goodness my sister-in-law Megan saved the day by driving to FedEx to pick up some of the flowers that never got delivered. (They would have sat there until Monday!).  Also I do NOT recommend using SamClub – they substituted flowers out since apparently my roses were not available and sent Calla Lilies instead.  I did not know this (they never told me and could not give me information about my order when I called at the time).  I actually assumed I got the wrong flowers by accident, and it took 4 months of phone calls, emails, and reports to the BBB to get the money back for the flowers I never received.   Learn from my mistake and do not use Sam’s Club.  Their customer service was. the. worst! The vases and glasses all came from goodwill or garage sales or thrift sales.  My mom and I were both on the look out for vases for months leading up to the wedding and brought them all together at the end.   This is the beauty of the flexibility of this design, it didn’t matter if they weren’t all perfect tor didn’t all match.  I loved this.  Bonus: I have just recently sold the vases to another bride and have almost made back all our money. Score.   Also some guests took some of the flowers home and that was fine as well.  After the wedding was over, we didn’t go on a honeymoon immediately, so we took the flowers home and spread them throughout the house and it was so fun.  I love that I was able to enjoy them for even longer than “just one day”.

The Results –  Overall I could not have been happier with my flowers.  It was truly one of my favorite parts of the wedding.  My mom and Tom’s aunt (and others!) worked tirelessly to get every vase filled and my mom just did awesome on my bouquet.  Not to mention it was so much more special than hiring it out.  I love that there will always be a story behind it.  I do think it took a lot longer than I had originally planned to get all the vases filled and the flowers cut and arranged.  I also think that I overbought on flowers since we still had some left.  I just wasn’t sure what to buy and when you buy in groups, there is so many you have to buy at once of course.  (Like groups of 10!). If you are interested the types of flowers I bought were:  Peonies, Ranunculus( So gorgeous), Baby’s breath, mini Carnations, Garden Roses, and Spray Roses (which never arrived).