Budget Wedding Tips - Part 7: Flowers

Bridal Bouquet

Wedding Flowers


I love fresh flowers.. but back when we were planning our wedding, it was more important to me to minimise stress and maximise value for money, and we were getting married in summer and I just thought of hundreds of dollars of wilted flowers!


I had always loved Calla lillies (aka Arum lillies) and was intrigued by the idea of using good quality faux flowers as some of the girls on I-Do had mentioned in their posts on the wedding forum.  These lillies were out of season in summer when our wedding date was set.


I found some lovely latex calla lillies (I can't recall where now) which looked and felt more like the real thing than the fabric/silk ones.  I purchased some cream ones for myself, and bright red ones for my bridesmaids.


I then googled floral arrangements and wedding bouquets and armed myself with floral wire, floral tape and began to play with faux flowers, and arranging them.
I learned from reading on the net how to make the ends of the bouquet look professionally made by wrapping them with ribbon, then securing with pearl-head pins.

Stems of my bouquet wrapped with ribbon and beautiful vintage-style lace, hand sewn pearls and Pearl Head Pins

 I researched how to make buttonholes for the guys and wrist corsages for the mums, and a little bit of googling was all that was needed to figure out "How To" for these.


The eve of the wedding
I did buy a $40 deal from a local flower grower which included 6 ivory roses, 6 red roses and a bunch of ivory Lisianthus delivered to my parents house the day before the wedding.  I made the buttonholes, wrist corsages and added a few fresh flowers to the faux flower bouquets the day prior.  I sourced twigs and greenery from the gardens around my house and added these too.


Research on the net indicated that it's never a good idea to put flowers in a regular fridge (apparently florists have special fridges) as they'll look much worse, so being a 40 degree summer day I put them in the garage which was the coolest place in the house.. they did fairly well considering!!

My Dad's Buttonhole

Lisianthus Wrist Corsage

Groom's Buttonhole, Red Groomsmen's Buttonholes

Bridesmaid Bouquet

Stem of Bridal Bouquet

I managed to source velcro wrist corsage "holders" from the US on eBay for a few dollars each and secured the fresh flowers onto them using green floral tape and then added a sheer chiffon ribbon as a flourish.  The mums both loved them and they looked gorgeous with their outfits.


Sourcing Faux Flowers:
I found a great online source at:
eBay Store Flower Land - they sell premade faux flower bouquets and individual stems if you want to have a go yourself


I also found Spotlight and Lincraft to have a good variety of flowers, some better quality than others, but Spotlight was fantastic also for floral tape, floral wire and pins.