Wednesday, May 19, 2010

DIY Wedding Flowers {part 2}


Last week I promised to give you instructions on how we made the bouquets and centerpieces for our daughters' weddings.

Being on a limited budget, we did a lot of research to find high quality flowers @ the best price.

When ordering a large amount of flowers, there are great on-line floral shops with good prices.
We ordered roses and gerber daises from
The Flower Exchange.com. We also purchased flowers from Costco, Safeway and a local berry/flower farm.

One piece of advise if you're planning on doing your own wedding flowers ~ do a practice bouquet first. This will help prevent mistakes and panic with the wedding day flowers.

Here's our sample arrangement ~ we started with a single rose in the center, and added other flowers around it along with greens and accessory pieces holding it together with floral tape and wire. With the real bouquets we added ribbon to the stems the day of the wedding.



Two days before the wedding....flowers arrive via...Fed Ex !





When ordering flowers on-line, you should allow them to set at least 8 hours at room temperature before working with them.

Use clean buckets of water with flower preserving solution in them. Allow the water to set at least 4 hours before placing flowers in them.


This will prevent the roses from drooping over near the flower head.


Remove any foliage on the flowers that will be below the water level.


Cut rose stems @ a 45 degree angle about one inch from the bottom.








After arranging our flowers, we placed them back in water
and stored them in a cool place.



Here are the finished bouquets.







The table arrangements were made using garden flowers, roses and daisies
along with ivy and wild Queen Ann Lace placing them in vases filled with wet oasis foam.




As for the large floral arrangements, we started with wet oasis in a vase. The first to be placed were the roses followed by the other flowers adding the greens last.

Joy

I'm linking this to



A Soft Place to Land DIY Day

Boardwalk Bragfest at bobbypins boardwalk
Always Nesting













12 comments:

  1. You did a great job on these flowers. You should be a florist! Nothing like pink for a wedding! God bless you today and always, Robyn

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  2. Joy, those are amazing!!! Wow, I'm so impressed. With one wedding down and two more daughters with serious beaus, I wonder if this may be in my future....are you in Oregon? You really are very talented and I know your daughter is lucky to have you for a mom.

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  3. I'm getting ready to do another wedding too. It's so much fun! (and work)
    I featured you on We Can Do It Cheaper this week. Be Sure to stop by!

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  4. Thanks for the tips - your flowers worked out so well. We're looking at doing the same thing for my son's wedding. How did you know how many flowers to order?

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  5. In answer to your questions on how many flowers to order. When we did a practice boquet we played around with how full we wanted them to be and then ordered the amount from that figure. Our bridesmaids bouquets had around a dozen roses for the one daughters wedding. The other wedding had less roses and more of the fresh picked flowers. The fresh picked we just picked several bundles. For the larger arrangements we stared with 2 to 2 1/2 dozen roses and then bought several bunches of the other flowers. There again you have to play around with it a bit. We ordered extra roses to use for the table arrangements. If you order flowers on-line they do have a minimum amount to order or groupings. They even have wedding packages. We however ordered just roses and gerber daisies on-line. We did find that the roses held up great but the gerber daisies not as well.

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  6. Those are beautiful!!! What a great job!!
    I'm new here...glad I found you!

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  7. Great job! Love it! Please stop by and enter my giveaway... http://jillybeansdoggieboutique.blogspot.com/2010/05/doggie-bed-giveaway.html

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  8. Great job. I helped a friend with wedding invitations and am bragging about those. She would be very interested in seeing your bouquets.

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  9. I love working with flowers, though I've never worked with the REAL thing -- always bouquets from silks. I've been told it's a whole other ballgame when you're working with the real thing and I can see that it would be. Much more to take into consideration. The turned out wonderful -- beautiful job!

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  10. Those are beautiful! Thank you for all of the great tips too! Theresa

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  11. Woo Hoo! I'm so glad you linked this post to Woo Hoo! Wednesday to share. I bet I'm not the only one filing this information away for future use :)

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  12. How gorgeous! We looked at Costco flowers. I would have been too afraid to attempt this.

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