We’ve shared our invitations and wedding location, and today, the wedding celebration continues.  This time, we’re talking flowers.  In my opinion, flowers always add elegance to any occasion.  For a high impact on a low-budget, I asked my cousin, Jenna, to lend a hand to create our DIY floral arrangements.  Luckily, she said yes, so I ordered flowers through an online wholesale company.

What did we order?  Well, tulips are my favorite flower.  Unfortunately, June is not tulip season and I had a hard time finding them affordably priced.  But, we did find them, so we ordered around 150 in white, using most for the bouquets.

The bouquets were as simple as grouping the flowers in a slightly domed cluster and cutting the stems.  Then, we wrapped the stems with wide white satin ribbon and added a decorative thin black zig zag of ribbon.  Round silver pins held everything firmly in place.  My bouquet had about 45 stems and the bridesmaids had about 25 each.  Simple and stunning.

Alstromeria are beautiful filler flowers, so we ordered roughly 120 stems.  Having never ordered from this company, I ordered at least 2 bunches more of each flower than I needed, to have extras if the quality wasn’t great.  We bought 50 white roses and over 30 bunches of daisies for a grand total of $350, including shipping.  When the shipment arrived a few days early and was left at the door without being signed for (no one was home) I feared for the worst.  Luckily, everything was well packaged and in great, budding shape.

Because I’m relatively terrible at floral arrangements, I decided the way to achieve the best results would be to keep one flower type per vase, with three vases per table.  Which means we needed 45 vases.  Where did I go?  First, I searched through my sister’s kitchen and took some tall beer glasses.  Then, the thrift store and Ikea.  I didn’t want every arrangement to match, I just needed one tall, one medium and one small clear glass vessel for each table.  After finding a great assortment at the thrift store, I picked up a set of drinking glasses at Ikea.  Total spent on vases?  About 18 bucks, for everything!

Finally, flower arranging day had arrived.  First tip: Keep your flowers as cold as possible.  Second tip:  If you’re doing this yourself, keep the arrangements as simple as possible.  Third Tip:  Use interesting leaves to add greenery.  Fourth tip:  Remove all leaves that will be under water.  This will help keep the flowers alive longer.  Fifth tip:  Enlist lots of help!  We were lucky to have so many willing helpers to tackle wedding projects.  Ben’s brothers did manual labor and heavy lifting, my sisters and friends helped with flowers and set up, our aunt and uncle helped prepare their yard, and my parents coordinated everything.  A DIY wedding is definitely a team effort.

Each tall vase held four tulips and a few roses along with lemon leaf.  The middle vase held about 5 bunches of Alstromeria.  This arrangement was the easiest because we just cut the stems to length and tossed them in a vase.  The leaves on the stems were great greenery.  The small vases had a tightly clustered group of daisies and I decided to add Kermit mums to a bright green.  We also snagged hosta leaves from my mom and aunt’s gardens to use as greenery in these arrangements.

Each table had one of each, set in a cluster for maximum impact.  Four Ikea candles on each table provided warmth (not literally) and ambiance.  The head table and round tables had simple white plates, silverware champagne glasses and place cards.  See that little curled paper inside each champagne flute?  Those are place cards.  The little black boxes are favors, which we’ll share tomorrow.

With the table arrangements and bouquets done, we still had tons of flowers left over.  We made two small arrangements for either side of the fence entrance.

Two large bouquets for the head table.

Two large arrangements in flower pots filled the guest book/program/gift table.

We created most of the arrangements, but I wasn’t comfortable with the large arrangements flanking the ceremony.  We had a local floral company put these together a day before the wedding.  Surprisingly, each arrangement cost $

What did you use for your bouquet?  What is your favorite flower?

Our five-year wedding anniversary is this Friday, and I’ve been thinking about the events that lead us here today.  I met Ben in late October of 2005.  He proposed on February 4, 2006 and I of course said yes.  We started planning a September wedding, but schedules didn’t work, so we pushed the date forward to June 10.  Yep, four months to plan a wedding in the peak of wedding season was not a lot of time.  Now that we have the timeline covered, let’s share the wedding details.  How about we start where everything started?  The invitations.

I’m a control freak, so, with the help of my wonderful cousin Allison teaching me basic Photoshop skills, I designed invitations.  I found the floral stamp online and used it on each and every wedding paper.  I wanted a unique sized invitation, so I settled on a 7 inch square invitation with a 7.5 inch interior envelope and an 8 inch square mailing envelope.

Our wedding colors were basic black and white, to keep everything simple and elegant.

For the invitation, I used a linen textured black cardstock as the backing with a vellum overlay, printed with our wedding text in the Century Gothic font.  I like to mix modern and traditional styles, so it was a perfect balance.  Using white ink, I stamped the floral design on the black backing to soften the design.  The torn vellum edge gives more visual interest.  To hold the two layers together, I secured the sheets with small brass brads that I painted white.  Oddly enough, scrapbook stores didn’t carry white brads back in ’06.

The vellum interior envelope also had a floral stamp, this time in black.

I printed the mailing address on each envelope, so I also scanned in a stamp to add to the envelope.  Mailing address tucked neatly between the leaves of the design.

To cut down on postage (and counteract the higher price of the custom invitation size), we included RSVP postcards with a monogram and info on one side.  The other side simply had my mailing address and a floral stamp in white, for a neat tone on tone look.  I doubt most people noticed it except me, but I liked it.

For coordinating, but not matching thank you cards, I scanned in the stamp and enlarged my favorite section.  The white set went out to shower guests and the black set was for our wedding.  Actually, the black set happened completely accidentally.  I printed our invites at my old work, where they had a laser printer.  Not thinking to switch out my paper, my design printed on black card stock.  I loved the gloss on matte look, so I kept it.

Consider yourself officially invited to our wedding, which we’ll share more about tomorrow.  For now, what  is your favorite element?  Who knew that creating our wedding invitations would lead me to start creating invitations for other couples, and then start making art?  Strange world.