Your Wedding Flowers, Leave It To The Florist Or Do It Yourself?
You have several choices to make when deciding on your wedding flowers. First will you be having fresh flowers, silk flowers, or a combination of both? Will you leave it to your local florist and just pick out a style from a sample or catalogue? Do you want to sit down and consult with a professional floral designer, or attempt to do the flowers yourself?
Those are the questions that you need to answer before you begin to talk about what kind of flowers you want and in what colors.
For what it’s worth here is my experience on the subject. At my own wedding I was trying to keep costs down and I wanted to do as much myself as possible, so one of my bridesmaids who worked at a florist out of high school and I made all of the flower pieces for my wedding except for the altar flowers which we ordered fresh from a florist.
I knew I wanted silk flowers and as soon as we went to the warehouse to purchase my wedding flowers, I fell in love. There were so many colors and gorgeous blooms. I knew after my wedding I wanted to work with silks for weddings, and so I opened up a floral silk wedding business on top of my full time job, and learned as much as I could.
The wholesale warehouse where I got most of my supplies and flowers had a special event featuring some top floral designers who were to speak. I attended to learn from them and this is what I learned, but first I’ll tell you how I learned it.
One of the “top designers” took one of those 70’s style wide brimmed hats that were popular at the time and talked about creativity and design. He demonstrated by cutting the hat part of the rim, he then placed the rim over the head of a model and pulled it down to her shoulders and pinned it to the front and back of her dress. The effect was that of an Egyptian garment. Everyone applauded at how clever this was. I left.
What I learned from that demonstration was that if you placed a piece of garbage on a stick, some bride somewhere would not only carry it down the aisle but would pay big bucks as long as she believed that a top designer made it. The other truth is that flowers are beautiful and there is little you can do to ruin them. So don’t be afraid to do the silks yourself and in some future post I will show you how. Leave a comment if you are interested in learning.
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August 16th, 2008 at 1:34 pm
What’s most important is to know what you want, what you can afford, and to then choose someone you can trust if you hire a floral consultant. There are always horror stories, but for each one there are a myriad of happy wedding stories too!
October 4th, 2008 at 8:59 pm
Hello Kathleen, I’m in the silk flower biz, too. I love my silk flowers at Pick Your Own Bouquet (www.pyob.com) and it’s because there are some manufacturers that make beautiful flower replicas they are so real-looking from the colors and even down to the natural veining.
There are those people that snub “silk flowers” and say, “I only work with fresh flowers”, but I don’t think the quality is there that there used to be with most of the fresh flowers coming from Ecuador and Colombia and the genetic altering and pesticides just ruin the smell anyway.
Truth be known the quality of silk flowers has improved over the years, while fresh flower quality has tanked. Maybe it’s because grocery stores got into the business with that kind of cheapened fresh flowers. Fresh flowers that used to last 10 days, now only last 6-7 days. I really don’t even know what the cost benefit is anymore. Working with silk flowers has a much better cost benefit and the beauty doesn’t fade.