Weddingbee Blog

Flowers. I’m still feeling clueless about them, but I’m doing all I can to help my indecision along to see the light. I’m now 90% sure I will DIY and order in bulk online. Like any other online shopping, it’s always nice if you can see the product before making your purchase. In early July, I stopped at a flower stand to look for the flowers I’d been considering, so I could see and work with them firsthand. They didn’t have what I was looking for, but they offered to pick them up for me on Monday. Perfect! I requested several bunches of sweet peas, garden roses, anemones, and wax flowers. I said I preferred whites and creamy colors but would take any color since some flowers were not in season. This is what I picked up on Monday:

One bunch of spray roses, one bunch of sweet peas, one bunch of dahlias, and 5 peonies from another stand for free, since they were near death!

Hey, I only needed them to be perky for a few more hours, so why not? The total cost was $16. Not bad, but I didn’t get exactly what I asked for either! Sigh. What’s a bride to do? Go on with the experiment, of course. After seeing black and white anemones online, I had been going gaga over bouquets like these two from The Bride’s Cafe.

Of course, anemones were out of season at the moment, so I had to use my imagination. For my experiment, I didn’t have any ribbon or floral tape. This was a very informal 10 minute DIY with flowers and a cut up shoe bag. Classy is how I roll.

Bouquet #1. Considering she couldn’t get the colors I preferred and unless disaster strikes, my flowers won’t be seeing the light on our wedding day, I was pretty happy with this bouquet. The sweet pea blooms were dropping like crazy, so the few left are barely visible and didn’t hold up to my inspirations. Even on their last leg however, they did add some nice texture to the bunch.

Bouquet #2. I switched out the peonies for the garden roses. The roses I had been eyeing online were called garden peony roses. I failed to remember the word peony, so I was given small garden roses instead. Whoops. This bouquet wasn’t really bringing my inspiration pictures to life either, but it’s actually an okay bouquet ignoring the “fire and ice” colors that remind me of my 1998 prom.

One surprise was just how many flowers it took to fill a bouquet. While the sweet peas look like nothing, I had about 22 skinny stems of them in both bouquets. Make that 22 stems and 2 blooms. I was also working with 12 spray rose stems, 8 dahlias, and 5 peonies, and yet the bouquets turned out pretty small, though the handle was quite bulky. Maybe it was the shoe bag, you say? Quite possible, my dears.

Overall, I deemed the experiment a success. I now know how tiny sweet peas are, how fragile peonies can be with heavy heads on tiny stems, how resilient green and white dahlias can be, and also how garden rose to one can mean a completely different garden rose to another. This will definitely help me if I order my own flowers.

Side note: I just got an email from a florist who might be able to order flowers for me to DIY with (Yay! Access to a giant flower fridge.). The indecision is waning. I can feel it.

Did you have trouble deciding which flowers to go with, know exactly what you wanted from the start, or just decide to give your florist full creative freedom when it came to flowers? Any ladies experimenting with DIY like me?