Flowers. Ah, my favorite part of picking decor for the ceremony! I love flowers. Brett becomes very annoyed when we go on Jeep trips and I have to stop the Rubicon every 50 ft to get out and take a picture of a wildflower. The last of such trips we included my youngest sister, who is also a photographer. And she is much worse than I am!

Anyway… we like flowers. And, I love doing arrangements with fake flowers I’ve picked up at the local craft stores. So it only made sense to me, that I should do my own bouquets and arrangements for the ceremony. Now, let me just say, that my Mom was very skeptical of this decision. She was certain that because I’d never made a bouquet, bouttenierre or corsage before, that I’d never be able to make them and be satisfied with the result. I proved her wrong, about 3 weeks after I made the decision to make my own arrangements. I now have a 2.5 ft tall, 4 ft wide, altar arrangement. As well as two swags to attach to the candleabras next to the altar. And… I have 16 boutennieres, 5 bouquets, 2 wrist corsages, and 10 pin corsages… three turtle doves, two french hens… oh.  Sorry.  Anyway… there’s a lot of flowers.

The best part of making them myself means that I paid a fraction of what it would cost to order them from a floral shop, plus I have plenty of time to adjust them if need be, they won’t ever die, and I love getting to see the surprise on people’s faces when I tell them I did it all myself! Materials cost somewhere in the neighborhood of $200-300. Based on a $10,000 budget my website research said that I should budget $1,000 for flowers! Major savings!