Wedding Fridays | Floral Inspiration
Today the high is 77 degrees Fahrenheit in North Carolina and it really gets me thinking of spring and sun and naturally of beautiful flowers. I love fresh cut flowers in bright colors and wish we had the budget to have elaborate tablescapes and altar stands but simply put, we don’t. Even if we did, would that really fit with our causal backyard wedding “theme”? (By the way, not a fan of the word, theme, but you know what I mean.) Luckily our venue is already naturally beautiful and filled with greenery. I do want to find a florist to create my bouquet and my bridesmaids bouquets because that is just one D.I.Y. that this bride doesn’t want to take on. ;) My friend Jen used a family friend who works at a local grocery store and her flowers were amazingly beautiful and cost effective. I definitely plan to meet with her family friend before meeting with any expensive florist in the area.
For my bridesmaids, I would like each to have a different color monochromatic bouquet. Each bridesmaid bouquet would be the same flower type and same color like the bouquet of ranunculus below. My favorite flowers are dahlias, ranunculus, garden spray roses, peonies (although I don’t think they are in season in the fall), and how fun would a bouquet of just yellow billy balls with yellow carnations be? I love the look of pretty ribbon at the top of the stems and then just the long bare stems. For my bouquet, I would like to pull inspiration from the left picture below and have a mixture of all the different types and colors of flowers that make up the bridesmaids bouquets. And of course I love the ribbon around the stems with extra ribbon hanging down. I really like the use of loose leaves and greenery in the bouquet too. It is very effortlessly and natural looking although I am sure it took a lot of work.
For the groomsmen and special family members I plan to create fabric boutonnieres like those available by Peppermint Cloud. Craig’s boutonniere will have a real red dahlia flower like I mentioned in this blog post because he is special and all. :)
As for the decor I would like either lose flower arrangements on the tables or separate small glass jars and individual flowers in each one. My thoughts are for the table arrangements to look effortlessly and almost like wild flowers. I plan to do a pretty fabric table runner on each table so I don’t need a lot of flowers to make the tables bright and colorful. I also have a new love for succulents (perhaps because the are the one plant I can keep alive…) so I would like to also include potted succulents in mercury vessels along the tables.
My thoughts are that I can manage the table flower arrangements and simply purchase the flowers from the farmers market 2 – 3 days before the wedding. To see what kind of selection the Raleigh Farmer’s Market tends to have in mid October I went last year and even bought a bouquet to take home. Despite the poor iPhone pictures you can see that there was plenty of colorful flowers available and for reasonable prices!
I am still iffy on whether or not I trust the Farmer’s Market to just have what I need the week of my wedding so my other thought is to buy bulk online. Websites like FiftyFlowers.com and Blooms by the Box offer bulk flowers at pretty good prices. The only downside would be the lack of variety because you have to buy each type of flower in bulk. I could probably talk my florist into selling me bulk flowers for the tables. Do you have any experience with buying bulk flowers or tips for doing your own wedding flowers?
image credits: florals: Honey and Poppies + photography: April Smith & Co | florals: Blossom & Branch + photography: Robert Wagner | florals: Zest Floral + Lauren Brooks Photography | florals: Chelsea Fuss + Nightingale Photography | photography: Kellie Kano | photography: Jessica Claire
just remember, flowers are GORGEOUS no matter what! you really really can’t go wrong, unless of course you use old dead flowers haha.
no matter what the florals will be so beautiful, and the greenery that is already at HH will just excentuate that even more.
Not sure if you knew. . . but me and my girls (including my mom and stepmom) were up until midnight the night before the wedding making the centerpieces, bouquets, and guys flowers for our wedding. We ordered them whole sale in large bunches. We ordered 200 white roses and 300 red roses. The red roses were delivered on time and we had to immediately unpack them. It was kind of annoying because instead of enjoying my time, I was worrying about finding buckets, filling them with water, unpacking the roses, and getting them in water. The white roses didn’t show up on time. We had to call and complain. They told us that they may be delivered as late as Sunday (our wedding was Saturday). Long story short, they finally delivered them just in time and gave them to us at no cost because of the mess up. Apparently there was a huge festival in Ecuador where the roses were coming from and white roses were not suppose to be ordered. Anyways, the night before the wedding, my girls and I were up in my bridal suite putting together all of the arrangements. The original plan was for Jason and I to have red roses and the remaining bridal party have white roses. Also, the centerpieces on the tables were suppose to be red roses in square glass vases. When were were putting them together, they started looking bad and we noticed that the red roses were starting to look dull and dead. We ended up scratching ever idea and just running to Wal-Mart and buying red Christmas vases and just putting white roses in them. It wasn’t what I wanted, but I realized it didn’t really matter.
My advise is that flowers are flowers. We as brides care more about them than anyone else does. It doesn’t matter if you spend thousands of dollars and have someone put them together or if you buy them from Target on the way to the wedding. They will be gorgeous either way. Buying in bulk has pluses and minuses. Plus is it’s cheaper and you get a lot for your money. They negatives are you are spending your precious time (that you only get once) worrying about the flowers and putting them together rather than spending time with family and friends. The thing I did like about doing my own flowers was it kept my nerves calm and didn’t allow me to think about getting married the next day. Luckily I went to field of flowers before I left for the wedding weekend and got a handful of fillers. Thank God for them. They saved me. BTW. . . Hydrangea’s are amazing fillers. They are cheap and take up tons of room. Hope it all helps.
For any diy wedding flower or wholesale flower purchases, its always recommended that one become familiar with how to setup flowers. Performing a trial run before the big day is a wise decision, or choosing some simple setups is good advice.