Our Homemade Wedding – The Flowers

Wedding flowers are expensive. Actually, put the word wedding in front of anything and it seems to multiply the price quite drastically! As I mentioned in my previous wedding post, we were trying to keep to a fairly tight budget for the wedding and this really didn’t stretch to professionally arranged wedding flowers! Additionally, we had the logistics to plan – we live some 2 hours from the wedding venue and I only had no annual leave just a routine day off the day before the wedding. I thought about artificial flowers (my sister had some lovely ones at her wedding) but somehow it just didn’t fit with my “vision” (for want of a better word) of the day.

And thus, I settled on dried flowers having been inspired by this photo. Also, dried flowers seemed kind of fitting for a winter wedding.  I wanted yellow – of course. So, My Boy and I set about drying roses. We would buy bunches of yellow or orange roses in the supermarket, hang them upside down with string from our curtain rails for about a week, spray them with hairspray to protect them and then store them in the airing cupboard to keep them dry. Then, we’d start with a new bunch. We had about 100 heads of roses by the time the wedding came around.

We presented them in vases bought from Ikea with rafia wrapped around the top to give it a bit of a rustic feel. This was my husband’s idea, having seen something similar at a wedding his band played at. The photos show a bit of how the tables were dressed, with candles in jars, logs and hessian further adding to the rustic feel I wanted.

Consistent with the rustic theme, I decided that I would also make my bouquet and those of the bridesmaids from dried flowers. Another trip to the supermarket followed and two massive bunches of roses, gypsophila and a yellow flower that I have no idea of the name of were purchased. I arranged the bouquets, securing them with florists tape and then drying them. Likewise, I made the buttonholes for my husband, the best man, the ushers and my dad. Once dried, I had to re-secure all the arrangements with more florist’s tape due to the inevitable shrinkage. I then wrapped the stems with yellow ribbon and more scrap sheet music. Thanks must go to our friends, Dr and Mrs H., who took all the lovely photos in this post.