DIY Monday: DIY Wedding Flowers

I guess as you get older, your friends get older too. Does that happen to you? Apparently with my friends, the older they've gotten, the more responsible they've become for covering their own wedding costs. Because of that, many of my friends have asked for help in creating largely DIY weddings on a budget. What? You too? Well maybe this will help you.

One such friend had a very tight budget for flowers and asked me for help doing flowers for her fall wedding. I wanted them to be fantastic, but I only had about $100 to do her arrangement, bridesmaid's bouquets, numerous corsages and boutonnieres as well as table decorations. I had to get creative.

This was the best kind of wedding in my opinion. A group of friends got together to create a fantastic wedding day at a local coffee shop's basement that doubles as an urban church on Saturday nights. A couple friends "catered" the food and took care of the table coverings. Another friend made the cake. Yet another did the photographs. And I worked on the flowers. It may not have been the Willard, but it was a beautiful, delicious day of celebration.

As for the flowers, I chose mums. It was fall, they were in abundance and the groom was Korean. I was lucky in that my mother had just brought a bunch of bittersweet she'd cut from her yard, so I had that in abundance to fill in the gaps. I knew I wouldn't be able to use hundreds of cut stems - the budget wouldn't allow it. Instead I reserved the cut stems mainly for the bridesmaid's bouquets, using grasses from my yard as greenery. I then used the leftover cut flowers to accent the rest of the arrangements. I found some lovely ribbon in vibrant green at Wal Mart to wrap the bouquets, which doubled as table decorations for the reception.

I used potted mums (on sale if I could find them) to make the corsages and boutonnieres. In order to create a more modern design and to make them "pop" a bit, I wrapped the finished stems in copper wire and left a spring of copper wire at the end. I splurged on larger potted mums for the table decorations, carving out a large pumpkin for the main arrangement and putting the pot directly in the pumpkin to hide the plastic pot. I then stuck some of the stems into the potted mum to break up the color and add texture. We sprinkled bittersweet and gourds along the tables and around the food for color. As for the cake topper, I hollowed out a miniature pumpkin and added stems cut from potted plants.

The bride's bouquet was special. She wanted roses and so we used old-fashioned spray roses that opened as the day progressed. I tied her arrangement with more wire-edged ribbon and her arrangement was used on the cake table as decoration after the ceremony.

The result was lovely. The bride was thrilled. And the best part? We stayed in the $100 budget and had some of the most gorgeous arrangements I've ever had the pleasure of doing. Perfect.