How Bride DIY'd Her Wedding Flowers and Lived to Tell the Tale
(Photos: D’Avello Photographers www.davello.com; Derrick Shore)
With a DIY wedding, friends and family came to be a huge help. But when two brave friends offered to take on the hefty task of flowers, we wondered how much was too much to ask?
If budget is a big concern, there are a lot of things you can do to cut costs. For our wedding this spring, my then-fiancé Adam and I did everything we could: haggling with absolutely everyone, using budget vendors, doing it off-season and cutting out some things all-together (live music, etc.).
But the most significant savings came when we were able to rely on our loved ones for help. We had our friends do the calligraphy on our invites, make favors and decorate the venue.
(Photo: D’Avello Photographers www.davello.com)
The most unbelievable and generous offer came from one of my very best friends, Derrick, and his friend Jon, who declared that they were doing the flowers. I smiled and politely declined their offer - not because I thought that they weren’t capable of making amazing arrangements, but because I didn’t want to pile that much work on them.
Time went on and Derrick persisted. Finally, my fiancé convinced me that having Derrick and Jon do the flowers was not me saddling them with a burden but letting them help us on our special day, which is exactly what they wanted: to help us out. How could I disappoint them?
And they KILLED it!
(Photo: Derrick Shore)
Right off the bat, I had no idea what I wanted. I’m not sure if this made things easier or harder, but my color scheme for the wedding was “All the colors”. I scoured Pinterest for ideas about colors and themes, but without seeing anything in real life it was useless. It was decided that Derrick, Jon, Adam and I should take a trip to the LA Flower Market in Downtown Los Angeles to see what was in season and what was affordable. (If you live in LA and have never been, the $1 entrance fee is well worth it.)
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Seeing the possibilities up close was overwhelming. Ultimately I relied on Derrick and Jon to manage everything. Boy, did they manage it! We gave them a budget of $1000 and they had free rein to do what they wanted. Keep in mind that if we were going with a florist it would be two times, five times, or as I later learned from a friend, substantially more.
(Photo: Derrick Shore)
First we needed vessels in which to put the flowers. In the spirit of sticking to a budget, my fiancé offered to build wooden boxes in place of traditional vases. A good rule of thumb when creating centerpieces is that the flowers will be 2x wider than the vessel itself. For us they were 7”x7”x4” high.
He cut down some scraps of plywood, glued and nailed them together, sanded them and then lacquered them a few times to get a shiny finish.Then he sealed the inside with a combination of spray-sealant and silicone caulk and voilá: Water tight wooden vases! He then filled each box with green foam and covered it with chicken wire to help the flowers stay in place.
(Photo: Derrick Shore)
As we drew closer to the big day, Derrick and Jon planned and plotted. They had already, weeks earlier, ordered the flowers from the vendors we met at the flower market. On the Thursday before our Saturday wedding, they picked up the flowers and brought them back to Jon’s loft, which they turned into a refrigerator. With the AC cranked up to maximum cold, they dove in.
Fortunately, Jon’s loft has concrete floors so the clean-up was comparatively easy.
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(Photo: Derrick Shore)
Derrick and Jon worked for the next 48 hours to create their amazing masterpieces: 22 unique centerpieces, 3 bouquets, and 6 boutonnieres. With the help of my matron-of-honor’s husband’s sprinter van, they delivered the flowers with just a few hours to spare. And everyone was blown away! A friend who was at the wedding whose parents are florists in New Mexico said that it looked like about $20k worth of flowers. I don’t think it was hyperbole.
(Photos: D’Avello Photographers www.davello.com)
All-in-all it took 5 people over 180 hours of work to build boxes, find flowers, strip stems, arrange arrangements, build bouquets and boutonnieres and finally deliver the goods. And all it cost was time, a few bottles of prosecco, and a little over $1000. I’m not saying that it was an easy task. My husband and I are blessed to be friends with such dedicated and talented people as Derrick and Jon who were not only willing, but aggressively insistent on helping us out.
I suppose my take-away is: let people who genuinely want to help you, help you. If you have faith in your friends and they won’t take no for an answer, let ‘em run with it. It’s flowers, what’s the worst that could happen?
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