My daughter first met her now husband while attending University. He was studying in the USA, but came from Hungary. They got engaged while visiting Hallstat, Austria. Their friend group comes from all parts of the world: Hungary, Mexico, Brazil, Latvia, Lithuania, Spain, Australia, Turkey, Costa Rica, and the UK. Because of this, they knew that they wanted their theme to be World Travel. My daughter was the OPPOSITE of a Bridezilla. She left all of the planning up to me with just a few simple requests. She wanted to somehow include her mother-in-law who would be traveling in from Hungary as much as possible, she wanted the color palate for her bouquet to be in white, cream, and pale pinks, she wanted the bouquets to be simple with very little greenery, and she wanted to include the favorite flowers of the women who meant the most to her. (Mother, Mother-in-law, Grandmothers, and Bridesmaids)
I figured one way to meet my daughter's few requests was to do our own flowers with the help of the Bridal Party, both moms, a sister-in-law, an aunt, and a family friend. Although none of us had much experience with fresh cut flowers, we all had a love for beautiful flowers. We knew we could do this! As this was a Sunday Wedding, all of our flowers were delivered on Thursday. It took myself and my daughter's mother-in-law about 1.5 hours to prep all of the flowers. We used about ten - 5 gallon Home Depot buckets with fresh flower food from Floralife. I stored all of the flowers in my finished basement with the AC on. All of our flowers opened beautifully over the next couple of days.
On Saturday, the ladies gathered in my basement while the men played games outside and took care of the food. We threw some plastic on the floor, set up a couple of tables and went to work! The bridal party started with their bouquets. They included a favorite flower from each of the Bride's special ladies and then added a few extra of their own personal favorite flower. So each of the bridesmaids bouquets were similar, yet unique. (Garden rose, Gerbera Daisy, Lilly, Carnation) My daughter did the same for her Bridal bouquet, making it just slightly larger than the Bridesmaids' bouquets.
After the bouquets were finished we set to work on the 14 Center pieces. We used pedestal vases that I had purchased from ETSY with Oasis Floral foam inside. In addition to the flowers that were purchased from Fiftyflowers, we also used about 30 Hydrangeas that we cut that morning from my flower gardens. The hydrangeas that we chose to use were off white Anabelle hydrangeas and Pink Endless Summer hydrangeas. These hydrangeas were rather large and worked perfectly for the base of our arrangements. We had no set rules for the centerpieces, except to not leave any open spaces. Everyone was creative and we ended up with 14 BEAUTIFUL, but different centerpieces. It took the 10 of us ladies about 2 hours to make 6 bouquets and 14 centerpieces.
On the morning of the wedding we transported the flowers to the Wedding location. We used the tip from Fifty Flowers of using the flower boxes to transport. This worked wonderfully! At this time we left a small vase with some flowers in it to be added to our wedding cake. It was a HOT, humid August day in Michigan...but all of our flowers held up so well. The Garden roses smelled wonderful the entire day and night!
We got sooooo many compliments on the flowers. People could hardly believe that we did them ourselves. Doing our flowers through Fifty Flowers not only allowed us to stay on budget, but they were absolutely beautiful. We were able to include the people who meant the most to us while having THE BEST time doing so. I would highly recommend FiftyFlowers to anyone who is considering doing their own wedding flowers!
