Tips for beautiful DIY wedding flowers

I played a florist recently- and my kitchen was a flower workshop. It was glorious. The smell of the flowers and greens filled the whole house and I was mighty obsessed with the many buckets of blooms. They weren’t just for enjoying in the house though- these flowers were for my brothers wedding – and I was doing DIY wedding flowers and creating the arrangements for them.

DIY Wedding Flowers

I mean, I love flowers. LOVE flowers. You know me and know that flowers and living with flowers are a big thing for me. But I am not a trained florist nor someone who knows the ins & outs of wedding flower design. So when my brother and his new bride asked me to do the flowers for their wedding- well, first I was honored. Second- I was a bit nervous. I have not done flowers for such a large event before but that said, of course I agreed to do their flowers. Floral arranging is a big time passion of mine and I was up for the challenge to create something with big impact on a small budget.

Most of the photos today are screenshots from videos that I took so they aren’t the best but you get the idea. I also shared a video on Instagram this morning of the behind the scenes.You can find that at French Country Cottage on instagram.

Side note: My sister has these boots too and we were both going to wear them to celebrate Evan & Jamie. The wedding venue was in the wine country and so, boots were a good fit. Tay chose a blinging dress last minute so the boots were out for her- but I kept them and wore them with my dress and so enjoyed not cramming my feet into high heels for the night.

Big Flower Impact on a Dime

There were a lot of tables. Which meant a lot of arrangements. Which meant a lot of flowers to order, a lot of vases, a lot of everything basically. I order flowers from the SF Flower Mart and specific vendors who are my go-to all the time- so I knew I could find a good selection for the look and count on them to make sure they had the flowers and they would arrive on time. But figuring out how many of each flower I needed required a couple of prototypes.

Jamie told me the colors and look she was after- it was gorgeous creamy whites and vanillas with a tiny pop of color. We picked up hydrangeas, roses, thistle, and other elements from our local Safeway supermarket to create a general idea prototype so we could chat about the look and the cost.

An Abundance of Blooms

Jamie approved and loved the designs and so up next was calculating how many of each flower we needed to create each arrangement.

TIP: Create a floral blueprint or each arrangement. Example- 3 hydrangeas, 7 garden roses, 3 thistle, 5 sprigs of eucalyptus, etc. Then you can multiply how many you need for each arrangement and allow for extras.

Choose Big Impact Flowers

We chose flowers that had big impact without big $$$$. Since we were creating so many arrangements- we needed some blooms with oomph to fill the vases and create some drama without a drama filled price tag for more flowers. Note: We ended up not using some of the prototype flowers because of cost and availability issues.

Tip: Flowers like hydrangeas, regular variety roses that look like garden roses, fluffy stock and baby’s breath are all flowers that have big impact in a vase but that don’t have a big cost. Plus stock, baby’s breath and roses along with the eucalyptus smell amazing – so they add a little oomph for the scentsense to the tables.

Be Thrifty

We spent a couple of hours thrifting for the vases to save on costs. She didn’t want mason jars and the best price for the size vases we needed for all the tables was going to be about $6-7 each with tax and shipping. So, we scoured the shelves at the thrifts- and we found 25 round ‘fishbowl’ vases that were almost all the same size and most ranged from 50 cents to $2 each. Bingo.

Tip: Be Thrifty. There are a lot of folks who diy weddings and order vases- and they donate them to the thrift stores when they are done. Take advantage of that and see what you can find.

There were a couple larger vases we needed for the wedding aisle and also some tall vases for the sweetheart backdrop and random tables- we managed to find both of those styles at the thrift stores too.

Go faux

Yep. We did it. Jamie found some faux flowers for the arch she wanted to use ordered those. That cut down on the fresh flower cost and they looked beautiful. You could not tell that they were not real behind the real flowers so I would recommend doing something like that if you are on a tight budget.

I also used a realistic faux garland from Balsam Hill as a base for the sweetheart table arrangement and added fresh foliage and flowers to it to create a full table swag for them. Perfection. I don’t think that even Evan and Jamie knew there was faux- it was so realistic. You can find it HERE and don’t forget to use COURTNEY2023 for an extra $35 off any $350 purchase for a limited time too. I will do a separate post on creating the sweetheart table swag.

A couple of screenshot of videos from setting up -apologies that they are dark and not crisp in photo form- I didn’t have a lot of time at the venue to take proper photos.

But you can see that there were 2 long sections of tables- about 60′ total and then a dozen round tables arranged on both sides of those. So pretty.

Where the flowers landed After the Wedding

As you know, some of them landed on the flower filled Christmas tree styling I did in the living room- but- they also landed somewhere else and I am excited to share the look. Stay tuned.

Here is the happy couple- they looked so beautiful!! It was such a fun evening with family celebrating them!