For my first blogging assignment, I chose to investigate my options on doing my own flowers for my wedding.
I grew up on Cape Cod, which is a premiere wedding destination location and all through college I worked at a country club that hosted a wedding almost every weekend. I have looked at a lot of arrangements and always thought that I could do them on my own for a lot less money. I’m pretty handy and I am a lot cheap. Unfortunately, the more I looked into doing my own flowers the more I realized how much of a hassle it would be. In order to save a couple hundred dollars, I need to have a lot of time on my hands the few days before my wedding, and I also need to have a few other people to help, that also seem to have a lot of time on their hands.
There were quite a few sites on how to do your own flowers or how to save money on arrangements. One of the biggest hints was to look for flowers that are in season. If I had a flower that I really loved and it wasn’t in season, I would have to have it shipped from what ever part of the world the flower was in season for. That gets really expensive really fast. The other recommendations were to keep arrangements simple. People make a career out of arranging flowers and it takes a lot of work to make flowers look “effortlessly” arranged. For a newbie flower arranger, many websites suggest sticking with one type of flower and do them in bulk. If you want to mix up the flower, stick to one color. Many of the DIY (do it yourself) flower arrangement websites recommended that roses were great to work with because they were hardy and could handle amature man-handling. A more delicate flower would be crushed and destroyed by inexperienced hands. Hydrangeas were a good choice because of their size. They are so big that you only need to put a few in a vase and tuck in a couple other flowers, and you are set.
I was surprised to find websites that sold DIY flowers. That seemed a little strange and it seems a person is putting a lot to chance by not seeing the product before it arrives. Other websites suggested that you order the flowers through your florist or even the local grocery store. The biggest cost of the flowers was said to be the labor, and by doing it yourself, you are saving the bulk cost of the flowers. However, in order to save all that labor cost, you have to be prepared to do a lot of labor yourself, and on the busiest week of your life!
The first website that I went to pretty much turned me off on doing all my own flowers. I don’t think I have the time or the organization or the refridgerator space to pull it off. Directions as follows: first: recruit lots of help, second: make a recipe of flowers to follow, three: gather all supplies which means clippers, floral tape, ribbons, floral moss, flower preservatives, rose strippers, corsage pins, tall buckets, vases…. fourth: provide a cool space for the few days you are gathering up the flowers before the wedding, fifth: buckets of water, sixth: dedicated work area (of course, my house will have room the days before my wedding for my own personal floral shop…in addition to housing out of town guests, my wedding dress and all accessories, gifts that have been arriving, plus all my household junk that has been accumulating because I have been too busy with my wedding!) seventh: lots of time and extra flowers to practice my arrangement skills.
I don’t think so….one thing that I did see that I think I could manage was shallow glass bowls with floating gerbana daisies. That is DIY flower “arranging” that I think I handle. = )
