Floral Mayhem

Well, I designed flowers for my first wedding last weekend. Actually, I just did the reception. But with 30 guest tables and a head table to cover, the reception was plenty enough! All in all, it turned out well, but boy, was it a crazy process!

First of all, the bride liked some vases that were really for floating candles so the stems of the flowers didn't want to stay down. They'd float out of the water. My attempts at hot-gluing foam didn't work. The glue wouldn't stay attached to the vase, and it looked chintzy anyway through the clear glass.

So while I was praying for another idea a friend called and reminded me of this stuff that expands in water and you add to soil to keep roots moist. So we added some of those granules to the water to help keep the stems in. And it worked!

But the even bigger issue ended up being the flowers themselves. We had decided to use gerbera daisies, astromeria and lisianthus, all in shades of creamy white and soft yellow. I made a mock arrangement to see how many stems I would need of each, then ordered through a wholesale florist in town. Well, when I went to see the flowers two days before the wedding, the lisianthus looked beautiful but the astromeria and daisies were both the wrong color! When I tried to do a test arrangement, thinking maybe it wasn't as bad as I thought, the result was horrendous. The bright white of the astromeria made the creamy lisianthus look dingy and the daisies were shockly bright yellow. So much for subtle and lovely!

At that point, the florist couldn't return the flowers so we made do. She had some floral spray paint, so we painted the astromeria yellow. Then we cut a bunch of vines from our back yard for added greenery, then went to town making the arrangements without the poor gerberas that just wouldn't work no matter how hard we tried.

It was five hours of hard work on the day of the wedding with four other people helping, and as it was, we were 10 minutes late to the wedding, still in our work clothes! But Bryce brought our fancy duds and after the ceremony we changed in the church bathroom, then headed to the reception in style. It was fun to eat a good dinner together, enjoying the visual fruit of our labor. And most importantly, the bride (and her mom) were pleased.

It was quite the learning process for me. And now I'm glad it's over!