Weddingbee Blog

How about some budget friendly DIY wedding centerpieces, eh?

Before Mr. Dolphin and I ever went to our florist, we knew we wouldn’t be ordering centerpieces for our tables. We wanted to do them ourselves because we knew the added cost would put our budget over the edge. Since our wedding is centered around daisies (my fav!) we are planning simple and modern centerpieces for our tables.

Last summer I spent several weeks accumulating 40% off coupons for Michaels and proceeded to purchase 15 rectangular vases for our wedding centerpieces. 8 months later, we finally did a test run of our centerpieces (silly me, I didn’t even use our vases! But… you’ll get the idea).

You like? I LOVE!
Please imagine a rectangular vase… yes I’m a bad bride not using our actual vases. Oh well!

We ended up going with white Vero Daises and fuchsia Gerbera Daisies, with cut lemons in the vase. One thing I should note is that the acid in the lemons actually kill the flowers, so if you are planning on putting lemons in your vases, be sure to make the centerpieces the day of your wedding. The flowers should live through 2-3 days with the lemons in the vase, but after that they are pretty much dead {sad face}.

How about another glamour shot of these beautiful daisies?

We originally intended to have all white daisies in our vases, but realized that our tables needed a punch of color. We thought, ‘why not fuchsia?’ After all, fuchsia has managed to sneak into our invitation suite, our menus, our water bottles, and our programs… why not our centerpieces? And let me tell you, aqua, yellow and fuchsia go fabulous together!

And no wedding DIY is complete without approval by Dolphin Kitty…

Dolphin Kitty giving her “sniff of approval”.

And a DIY centerpiece post with out a price run-down would be unheard of… so here are the details:

• Rectangular Vases from Michaels $45 for 15 (40% coupon)
• 23 bunches of White Vero Daisies from Fifty Flowers $171.19
• 100 stems of Fuchsia Gerbera Daisies from Sam’s Club $138.58
• Lemons TBA

Total $354.77*
roughly $23.65 for each centerpiece

*this total includes plenty of extra flowers to fill vases I’ve purchased for the place card table, bar, etc. The wedding will be overflowing with beautiful daisies. Also, the rectangular vases hold more daisies then the vase pictured, so the above price is for the 16-20 daisies/gerberas that the rectangular vases holds, not for the amount of daisies you see in the picture above.

Since I didn’t price the lemons (bad little bride), we are going to say, for figuring the total price, that each lemon is 50 cents. With this figure, and using 1.5 lemons per vase, the total of each centerpiece is $24.40, which is not bad, in our book!

Sure, there is probably some way we could have done them for less, but overall we are happy with the way they are going to look, and we KNOW for sure that we are getting a better deal DIYing them ourselves then having our florist do them.

Are you planning on DIYing your centerpieces? What made you make that decision? Was it price, or something else (like the fun of doing it yourself)?