When a plan has to be changed...

We decorated for another wedding a few weeks ago - the delay in posting is due entirely to me being on holiday and the automatic scheduling not working for some reason! 

In all my years of doing weddings, I think this was the first one that we'd had problems with and had to change our plans...

Problem 1. Cabbage roses are VERY expensive: £4 a stem. As we needed around 170 (!) we'd have blown the entire flower budget just on this one flower type. So we had to change the order - reduce the number of roses and order double lizianthus instead in the required colours. 

Problem 2. The wholesaler could not get hold of white anemones, even from Holland, but he kindly replaced them with a black-eyed white mini gerbera to create a similar effect. We ended up leaving these out of the bouquet for the bride as they weren't a suitable alternative for her, but they were still able to be used in church.

Problem 3. Tight peonies. I discovered only recently that peonies do not like to be cut, and need rather a lot of persuasion to open up. After posting on a flower arranger group on facebook, I discovered that if you wash the flower buds in warm water and either knock them or force the outer petals open, then cut the bottoms and let them drink warm water, they will open up. Pleased to say...they did!

Problem 4. The style of bouquet was a loose, unstructured one. I've done handties quite successfully in the past, but they have more of a level outer edge to them. With this unstructured style, I found it difficult to get the right amount of 'sticky-out' bits to add movement when the roses and peonies had a distinct tendency to mass together all at the same level. The bridesmaids' smaller bouquets, with a larger variety of flowers, seemed to go together much easier, and in hindsight, perhaps we should have used a bit more variety in the bride's bouquet too. It's such a fine balance though, doing what the bride has requested while making it look right to the florist's eye! 

(I ought to add that we don't usually offer to do bouquets for weddings at church, but the bride's family are both long standing members of the congregation and friends, who asked us to do them.) 

Anyway, we got round the problems, and I am hoping (as I always do!) that the bride will be delighted with what we've done. Here's what we started with:

Not all the flowers! There were five or six more buckets full...

Some flowers went straight to the bride's mum, to fill jam jars for the reception at the farm. Others were sorted into 'church', 'crate' and 'bouquet' buckets...

It took three of us (myself, Rita and Ginny) around three to four hours to do everything, but we ended up with;

One little bridesmaid's flower ball. A first for me! I have to say that gypsophila fills in beautifully around the pink lizianthus. Not the most perfectly spherical of objects, this first attempt, but very pretty...

A sinkful of bouquets!

Here's one of the five adult bridesmaids' bouquets - a pink rose and pink astilbe, white lizianthus and eucalyptus.

The bride's bouquet has two shades of pink rose, pink peonies, a little bit of pink lizianthus and eucalyptus. 

The next pic shows everything boxed up and ready to be delivered. Look closely and you'll see two buttonholes too; I made the first with a gerbera before we had the message to keep them out of the bride's bouquet, so the second is lizianthus and astilbe, but I wasn't sure whether the groom would go for so much pink. It will be interesting to see which one he chooses... (Incidentally, I tried one of the roses initially, but they looked too massive for a buttonhole.)

In church, there were two arrangements either side of the altar cross;

You'll notice in these arrangements that we also used white waxflower. It's a good filler - a bit like gypsophila, but without the smell of cat wee! In fact, white waxflower has the most delicious lemony scent and was a pleasure to work with.

The windows were left un-flowered as the bride wanted to have candles instead. All the bunting and candle holders have been made by the bride and her mum.

We put a large arrangement in the porch...

...another on the font...

...and then, we did the crates. This was another first for us. We've had a milk churn and a wheelbarrow outside the church door for previous weddings, but this is the first time we've had a stack of crates. I think the effect is quite stunning - like a waterfall of flowers. 

In fact, I like this idea so much, I wonder whether I could do this instead of separate containers for the flower festival...I'll have to think a bit more about that, then see if I can borrow these crates!

Anyway, everything turned out well in spite of the issues we'd had, so I'm just keeping my fingers crossed that the bride likes what we've done.