I mentioned a few times that our hope was to grow our own flowers. It went about half according to plan, but the result ended up being just what we needed and (didn't know we) wanted. It wasn't the best year ever for flower growing: a lot of dry, sunny days went a long way towards a fun summer for people, but a less pleasant time for thirsty plants. Thankfully zinnias, cosmos, anemones, and sedum are drought tolerant, so we had a sizeable crop of those to decorate the reception tables.
The bottles, incidentally, came with the house I bought in 2005. They were on a bookshelf in the basement, and they were covered in dirt (some of their more stubbornly filthy friends weren't included in the decor). I'm very glad that my internal packrat insisted on salvaging them when I sold that house about a year prior to the wedding, although the idea to use them this way didn't come up until months later. The table runners have been used in two friends' weddings already, and I was excited to continue their tradition, too.
We didn't end up growing quite enough flowers to create five respectable (whatever that means) bouquets, so a friend and I spent part of the morning touring grocery store floral departments hunting for things in pale pink and white. We were prepared for a grand adventure, but we only needed to visit two stores, where we grabbed a few armfuls of pink carnations, pink roses, baby's breath, white spider mums, white daisies, white roses, and these gorgeous, delicate (and maddeningly unlabeled) white flowers with mauve speckles.
One of the few regrets I have about the wedding in general is that I don't have any photos of the bouquet assembly process. A bridesmaid and I weilded some fierce floral tape and wrapped, wrapped, wrapped our way to what I think were some pretty awesome bouquets, and a friend of The Awesome Husband used her skills as a former floral shop employee to cover the stems in brown ribbon. Here they are hanging out on the cake table while everyone danced and mingled. (Note: the cake topper is made of grocery store flowers, too; my mom stuck a bunch of rose buds in a half-circle of floral foam.)
While I didn't jump on the two-dress bandwagon, I *did* have three bouquets. Sort of. I created my bouquet as three small, separate bouquets that I carried together as one. I figured the best way to hand off my flowers during the reception (bouquet toss? no thanks. given to the winner of a dance-off for all the married couples? awkward, given the crowd. languishing, ignored, on a table? passable, but anticlimactic.) would be to give them to the demographic that would most appreciate them: there were three little girls in attendance between the ages of 4 and 6. And so, I made three mini-bouquets that looked like one bouquet.
The monolith being carried back down the aisle.
My cousin's daughters enjoying their respective third each.
And that's how we ended up with semi-home-grown flowers for the wedding. Blooms, floral tape, ribbon, and seeds for planting couldn't have totalled more than $100, and the result was perfectly suited to the day.
2 comments:
I love the idea of giving the flowers to the little girls! What a way to make a memorable day for them.
The initial reactions weren't what I was expecting ("no thank you" from the five year old and too-shy-to-look-at-me from the four year old, but I think they were appreciated in the end.
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