Wedding flowers

I like to think that between my mum and myself, we have many of the skills to tackle most things wedding related. I choose the things I knew I could do well, without a huge amount of pressure falling on us in the lead up to the day, and opted to bring in others when I couldn’t. Without splitting myself in two, I knew I couldn’t do everything.
I knew I wanted to do my own flowers. I knew I didn’t want to spend my flower budget completely on blooms that we would only appreciate for a short time on the day and would wither very soon after. I was very drawn to the idea that my flowers, or at least the table centres, would live to see another day.

Back in February I started making these

Paper flowers

Paper flowers

Paper flowers

Paper flowers

Paper flowers

Paper flowers

You can see my paper rose tutorial here.

Also back in February I visited my local garden centre and bought 30 small ivy plants working out at about, with the discounts at the garden centre at the time, £1 per pot. I repotted 2 to 3 ivy plants into one larger pot and left them outside to grow for the next 4 months, making sure they didn’t dry out.

They grew quite alot! Roll forward to June. Having made over 150 roses, I started to attach my paper flowers onto wooden kebab sticks. Some, I wired. These would be used within the bouquets. You can read about the wiring and sticking here. To any flowers that had open centres, I glued a pearl bead. There were so many roses, but we used them all!

Around 50 were set aside for the lady who made my cake

I had 13 table centres to create. These would also be used to decorate the room in which the wedding ceremony would be held and then moved onto the tables. My mum and I set to work in the garden on the day before the ‘Big Day’. I had already had a trial run back in February so we were quite relaxed about what we were doing.

We wrapped the base of the plastic plant pots (with holes in the bottom!) in foil and then again in plastic freezer bags. I had previously sewn up some hessian covers and we stuck this to the lip of the pots using a glue gun. To each table centre we added 4 or 5 paper roses (on kebab sticks)and 3 fresh ivory roses, just bought that day from the local supermarket. They looked wonderful all lined up. We gave them a water and left them in the shade down the side of the house. Next mum started on the bouquets. I had to admit I left it mostly up to her, for she is the expert when it comes to flowers, except for a few words of ‘yes, that looks nice’, and ‘no, too much’. We had cut some of the long trails of ivy and soaked them in a bucket over night. We had a few ideas on my Pinterest board but mostly these simple bouquets just evolved. I wasn’t wearing a big dress so I didn’t need a ‘big’ bouquet. My daughter, Freya’s bouquet was entirely made from paper roses with ivy wrapped around the perimeter. We thought she could keep it afterwards. Mine was a mixture of paper and real ivory roses.

We dropped the tables centres  off at the venue that afternoon; they had a wonderfully cool cellar built into the rock at the back of the pub. Yes, I did say pub. We got married in a pub, did I tell you? The Woodman Inn in Thunderbridge, Huddersfield. Take a sneaky look here, if you like.

We didn’t see them again until the following day.

Here

And here

And here

Of course many of my guests took one home to nurture. I have one too. The once fresh roses have long since gone. But I still have my pot of ivy and a few paper ones.

And I have plans for one of these at Christmas. Love, Lucie xx