How we made our bouquets

The sunflower-growing plan worked really well. If you have a garden and can plan ahead, I totally recommend growing your own flowers. We had a crew of my bridesmaids pick the flowers the day before the wedding. We set aside several of the largest, most beautiful flowers for the girls' bouquets, as well as the smaller-sized flowers for boutenniers (sp?) and wrist corsages. These remained untouched in 5-gallon buckets, each with the name of the girl who would hold it.

We didn't have quite enough flowers for all the bouquets, so two of my bridesmaids executed Plan B: They went to the farmer's market and scored 3 beautiful bunches of sunflowers for about $10 apeice. They also picked some wild that were growing along side of the road to fill in the aisle bouquets. (I had the best friends ever, btw.)

We then spent about 2 hours the day before the wedding putting together the flowers for the aisles- We just took two sunflowers, a sprig of greens, and some raffia ribbon and tied them all together. They sat in 5-gallon buckets in the cool basement and were in great shape the next day.

The morning of the wedding, we had two friends who had practiced putting together bouquets, etc, assemble the wedding party flowers. In all, it took them about 2 hours, working from the pre-prepared selections. They used flower wire, flower tape, and raffia ribbon. And everything looked FANTASTIC!










It cost less about $50 total for all the flowers, and they were really special because of the work we put into them and what they represented for me. :)