Weddingbee Blog

Amazing everything.

This is a picture of combined awesomeness. In this picture, you can see the beautiful table that our amazing caterer set up, and at which our wonderful wedding coordinator (Hi Laurie!) arranged for our pie-cutting to happen. You can see the hair wreath that I had made for my lovely wife, and you can see the hair flower that I purchased from another bee on Etsy. You can see my amazing suit, version 2.0, which fit just right, and you can see our beautiful, beautiful flowers.

So, I have a million things to say about our vendors and the people that we worked with. I really cannot say enough good things about most of the people who played a role in making our wedding happen. But let’s focus, people: let’s talk about our flowers.

When we started our wedding budgeting process, I think that most of the numbers we picked were pretty arbitrary. I had been following 2000 Dollar Wedding for a while, and I thought, If they can do it, we can do it. Well, it turns out that they could do it, but they also weren’t having the wedding that we were having. It turns out that while you can pay $20 for one person’s pretty good meal at a restaurant, caterers don’t work the same way; everyone we talked to suggested we expect to pay $70-90 per person. The point of this is that our budgeting was really off in the beginning. And my original willingness to stretch to pay $200 for flowers ended up seeming ridiculous. Flower people we talked to agreed to contact us, but never did; they tried to hide disbelief on their faces when I told them we wanted to keep it under $200.

Well, screw it, I thought. I don’t really care about flowers.

Hah. Here’s where that funny part comes in - you know, the part where you’re marrying another person who has their own opinions? Well, Fancee could give in on not spending $1000 on flowers, but she knew she wanted flowers.

photo by E. Leonardsmith

Well, one day I was walking along, thinking nothing about flowers for our wedding, when I ran into a friend at the farmer’s market. I had just gotten a flat tire on my bicycle and I needed to pick up my car from the garage in the opposite direction of my house (I promise this is relevant), and she offered to drive me home… but first she had to grab a few things from the market. So I followed her around, and I met her friend Melissa, who was working at her flower booth.

photo by Melissa’s Flower Farm

Her gorgeous bouquets were $5-$10 each. I sort of sidled up and asked if she might be able to make some similar bouquets - just beautiful, whimsical varieties - for our wedding. It turned out she lives just a few minutes from our venue, and not only could she do it, she would be happy to deliver them for no extra charge. On top of that, when I asked what the cost might be, she looked surprised and said, “Oh, the same as these!”

We arrived on the morning of our wedding, and the room was set up, flowers in vases on the tables… our two bouquets were all wrapped up for us, and ready to go.

photo by E. Leonardsmith

During the ceremony, I glanced down at my flowers and there was a little brown spider sitting on them. I know spiders creep a lot of people out, but since Charlotte’s Web and my parents’ reminders growing up that the spiders ate mosquitos, I love them. It felt like it was all pulled right out of nature and handed to us - or that we were just fit perfectly into the wonderful weave of the world.

Okay, call me corny, but I loved our flowers.

So here’s my advice, which is and will be the same for your dress, your caterer, your band…hold out until you find what feels right to you and your partner. Nothing is so important, so necessary, that you should settle—which is not to say that you need the best thing, or the most expensive thing, but the thing that feels right for you and who you are.

Now, if you’re in the Boston area, go check Melissa out.

What are your must-haves? What did you happen across when you least expected it?