A while back, we provided flowers for a unique DIY wedding. Emily, a blogger at Zen & Spice, got help from family, friends, and a bit of champagne, to style these beautiful DIY wedding flowers. The couple’s theme was rustic and vintage, which tied perfectly into their venue; a beautiful home from the 1800s, with a large garden behind it.
The event’s main colors were blush, royal blue (by way of the lacy ribbon wrapping many of the vases and jars), and whites, with lots of greens and accents of gold.
Keep scrollin’ to learn about Emily’s experience with DIY wedding flowers from her perspective, and to learn more about the wholesale flower process!
Wholesale Flower Order:
- Whimsical garden rose sample pack (opting for the blush pink, white, and white blush varieties)
- 10 bunches of new love baby’s breath
- 10 bunches of silver dollar eucalyptus
- 100 rose and 20 hydrangea DIY combo box (opting for white hydrangeas and roses, pink spray roses, seeded eucalyptus,and plumosa greens).
1. Talk with an on-staff flower consultant about your style
Our first step with FiftyFlowers was to speak with one of their on-staff flower consultants, Violet. She was SO amazing– she had me send her photos from my wedding floral Pinterest board and asked about my style. I told her we wanted a light, airy, romantic mood for my DIY wedding flowers. Like someone plucked a bunch of roses and eucalyptus from a garden and gathered it in a bunch!
2. Figure out how much wedding flowers you’ll need
We then told Violet how many bridesmaids/groomsmen we had, plus dads, grandpas, table settings, and other places we wanted to have flowers such as down the aisle, on the cake, on the bar, etc. Violet sent me a wedding flower worksheet, which can be downloaded for free! You basically put in how many arrangements you need, how many DIY wedding flowers you’re ordering, how many go in each arrangement, and it calculates how many you’ll have leftover. This spreadsheet was VITAL to everything we did: both in ordering the flowers and arranging them.
3. Order your floral and greenery
Violet suggested the DIY Wedding Pack ($399.99) that came with 100 Ecuadorian roses and 15-20 hydrangeas (colors of your choice!). We chose the white roses, white hydrangeas, the light pink spray roses (they come with the pack as a filler flower), and as our two greenery choices — plumosa and seeded eucalyptus.
Violet also suggested ordering the whimsical garden rose sample pack ($89.99) which came with 24 stems of up to four different colors of garden roses— we chose blush pink, white blush, and true white. We also ordered 10 bunches of new love babies breath ($119.99) and 10 bunches of silver dollar eucalyptus ($109.99). So in total, our floral and greenery total came out to $709.96 (with free shipping!). Now, tell me that doesn’t beat any quote you’ve ever seen from a florist!
4. Gather your floral arranging supplies
This is an important step! You want to do this ahead of time so that you have everything you need when your DIY wedding flowers arrive.
Here’s what you’ll need:
- Floral tape (Get plenty of this. I bought four rolls and I think we ended up using almost all of them!)
- Various types of satin ribbon (We used this ribbon for the bouquets and corsages and I bought a thinner navy ribbon at Michael’s for the boutonnieres.)
- Wire cutter
- Floral scissors
- Stem floral wire
- Pearl straight pins
- Corsage wrist bracelets
- Big heavy duty buckets (We used about 30 of these to hold the flowers in the water while they were blooming.)
- All of your vases/mason jars etc for table arrangements ready to go and filled with a couple of inches of water
- Clear plastic corsage boxes to transport your boutonnieres and corsages — go to the florist at a grocery store and you can buy these pretty cheap
- Cardboard boxes to transport the flowers
5. Schedule your delivery and floral arranging party
FiftyFlowers schedules the delivery of your flowers about three days before your event. The bulk of our wholesale flowers were delivered on Wednesday and some on Thursday morning since our wedding was on a Saturday. We scheduled the floral arranging party to be Friday morning– one day before the wedding.
Recruit! Invite your bridesmaids, mom, grandmas, sisters, aunts, cousins, etc and bribe them with breakfast and mimosas. Make sure you define a start time and depending on how many arrangements you’re doing, schedule 4-6 hours. I think we spent almost five hours, including cleaning up the mess afterward.
6. When Your Flowers Arrive
Make sure you will be home and you have a couple of hours to spend on the day of your floral delivery. It’s important that your home is set to a cooler temperature so the flowers don’t open up too fast. We chose to hold all of the flowers at my mom’s house, and her home is usually about 80 degrees so we had to crank up the air conditioning to a cool 68 degrees. We chose the darkest room in the house to keep the flowers out of the sunlight.
When the flowers arrive, open the box and inspect. Ensure that the flower buckets are clean and filled with at least 4 inches of fresh, cool water. Remove flowers from the box by cutting the straps, and cut the stems diagonally under running water with floral scissors to the desired length.
Trim the leaves off of the stem about four inches, so that no leaves come in contact with the water when the stem is in the bucket. I had my mother in law come over and help me process everything. Immediately after cutting, place in the prepared buckets. The flowers will arrive looking dehydrated and can take at least 4 hours for them to hydrate well and up to 12 hours to fully hydrate. You want to change the water in the buckets every 24 hours.
Flowers need room to breathe and bloom, so be sure not to put too many flowers in a bucket. We put about 25 stems in each bucket of the larger roses, and closer to 40-ish of the smaller roses. The picture below was only the white roses, pink roses, half of the babies breath and the silver dollar eucalyptus– when we were finished we had twice the amount of buckets shown!
7. The day of your floral arranging party
Party time! Make sure you’ve bought enough orange juice and champagne. Turn on some fun music and get started! We used my planning spreadsheet for each arrangement to know how much of each flower to use. One of my mom’s friends used to be a florist, so she was extremely helpful when it came to making the boutonnieres and corsages.
If this is your first time DIYing your wedding flowers make sure to take advantage of the helpful resources FiftyFlowers offers like how to make boutonnieres. The boutonnieres were simple but the wrist corsages are what took the longest, they’re more complicated. It also if you know someone who has made these before!
8. Transporting to the venue
We scheduled the floral party to be the day before our wedding, the same day as our rehearsal dinner so we could transport the majority of the floral the day before. The boutonnieres and corsages were stored in the fridge and my bouquet and bridesmaid bouquets were stored at home in the cool room. Most of our other arrangements were placed in the orange plastic buckets which made for easy transport, and others were placed in cardboard boxes. Day of the wedding, we took the boutonnieres and corsages out of the fridge and brought them to the venue.
Check out the finished arrangements beautifully captured by Genna V Photography.
Light Pink and White Bridal Bouquet
I did make my own bridal bouquet, which was really special. I recruited my dad to help hold the flowers while I taped. My bridal bouquet consisted of white Ecuadorian roses, blush spray roses, blush garden roses, babies breath, seeded and silver dollar eucalyptus and a few strands of plumosa. It was so beautiful and perfect!
Bridal Party Flowers
The beautiful bouquets were made up of garden roses, roses, baby’s breath, plumosa and silver dollar eucalyptus.
The Groomsmen
My husband wore a beautiful boutonniere made up of white rose, a sprig of eucalyptus and baby’s breath. The groomsmen wore a similar boutonniere but we used a smaller light pink rose instead.
Mason Jar Aisle Decor
We decorated the aisle with 12 mason jars that I applied blue lace to, which hung on hooks. Each mason jar held a few small roses, babies breath, and greenery.
Cocktail Hour Decor
Our venue had a beautiful courtyard behind the house where our cocktail hour was held. We had mason jars filled with floral on the cocktail tables and the food tables.
Sweetheart Table
We had twelve guest tables, each topped with several vases filled with DIY wedding flower. Our sweetheart table was decorated with two metallic gold vases along with all those candles.
Wedding Cake Flowers
We made sure to save some roses for the cake, which my sister decorated about 30 minutes before the ceremony. Didn’t she do an amazing job?
In the end, I am so glad that we did our wedding flowers ourselves. We saved thousands of dollars! However, it did get a little stressful when I had to do all of the calculations, get all of the extra supplies, plan deliveries, etc. But it was totally worth it to have our own, unique floral arrangements that we can say we did it ourselves!
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