Tuesday Morning Flowers

 

Now that the weather finally seems to nice and staying nice I'm leaning into the flower obsession.  I try to buy flowers once a week and this weekend I might stop at my favourite flower market on my way back from my parents' house to pick something lovely for the week.  It's so nice to have a big arrangement on the sideboard in the living room and I have heart that waking up to flowers in your bedroom makes you happier all day (well duh, and also - not very scientific).  Just looking at the pictures in The Flower Recipe makes me happy.  Joanna has posted a couple of very simple recipes this morning for you to test run.

Cherry

We missed the peak of Cherry Blossom Fest but they were still pink pink pink and gorgeous.  The tidal basin and the Jefferson Memorial are a hot spot for the blossoms and the new and incredibly moving MLK Memorial right on the water is fantastic.  The weather was warm and we grabbed chips and ice cream at the Lincoln memorial and trecked through the war memorials to the cherry blossoms where little children looked very much in danger of falling in and lots of mummies and daddies tried to rangle them into photographable positions and David and I worried about dropping camera and iPhones into the water.  Lovely Lovely.

Snap Dragons and Lavender

Way back in the pre-engaged engaged phase where we were getting married but he hadn't asked and I was scouring the interwebs looking for beautiful things I decided that if Meg and Peonies could do their own flowers than so could I. I found a DC area floral warehouse, ordered online and Friday morning Dad and my sister Jessie (yeah, I have three sisters, and a brother, there are a lot of us floating around) went to pick them all. My favourite flowers are snapdragons and I basically took the two colours of snapdragons that the warehouse had and then picked six other things in basically the same colours, a tiny bit of greenery and some berries and that was that.

I had been saving jars upon jars to pour the candles into and we used the rest for the centerpieces. None of them looked the same and we all just kind of went for it. People advised me to do a test run but I was poor and lazy (and still am) so I just decided to go for it when the flowers arrived and we did.

Gorgeous bridesmaids and sister put together flower arrangements

We arranged all the flowers in buckets and cookers and two of my bridesmaids, my Oldest-and-Best-Friend who DIYed her flowers in December and my sisters and I went to town. We made our own bouquets just sort of gathering them up and handing them off and that veteran friend wrapped the bouquets with floral tape and navy ribbon (something blue!)

Littlest sister rocks the hell out of flower arrangements

Maid of honor turned out to be florist extraordinaire

Now for the specifics: I kept looking for these when I was planning and I couldn't really find much. I had 400 stems, and spent less than $500 and we had SO many flowers. There were six bridesmaids bouquets, my bouquet, two little flower girl bouquets, twenty-table arrangements, four alter arrangements and heaps and heaps left over. We filled every vase in my parents house and there were flowers everywhere. It took a lot longer than I might have anticipated, there were seven of us and it took several hours to sort everything out. And the mess. There was a really big mess. My dad got the job of carrying all the stems and leaves to the compost bin.

I love

These flowers so much my eyes hurt.

Jenna: My Love, My Hate

WHY does she torment me so? So lovely. And yet so obvious and cliched and annoyingly corporate. Those are the sorts of flowers I want at my wedding. In those sorts of colours. I'm a bit scared of these flowers. It all seems a bit scary.

Digging, again

This and these colours are definitely what we're going for.

Digging

These. In a major way.

A Few Questions for YOU, dear reader

1) Are sixty of these enough? Is it insane to make 120?

2) Where can I find unbelievable fabric to make cloth napkins? Unbelievable mind you. Or I might go head and make those insane pom pom napkin rings and I don't know if that's a good idea. Or is it?

3) What colours of flowers should I get? Keeping in mind that the ring bearers are wearing blue seersucker and the bridesmaids are wearing "thistle" and "spiced wine" and "graphite" but I don't want to just do cream and I don't like matchies. Matchies is baaaaaaaaad for Hannah.

Share your thoughts, I'm in need of some thoughts.

We Can Make This, Right?

Because it's quite lovely. And I am feeling a little gross (Dear Self: do not eat donuts. You gave up sugar for lent. Also: Donuts make you feel not so awesome) so the idea of being able to make something quite so lovely makes me feel really really nice.

You know what else makes me feel nice? This fantastic $5,000 wedding. Yep. Five grand.

Now I'm going back to working. Or rather sitting at work not working. Since there is no work to be done.

Place Cards

So my Biddy of Honour/Alpha Maid/Head Biddy in Charge is a genius. You probably want to pay her a lot of money to plan your wedding. Barn wedding means no simple cards set on tables for place cards. Which had kind of been my thought. Something has to weight them down. So Mary thought of using tiny little bottles with a few tiny little flowers (very in keeping with my tons-of-flowers down the middle of the table thought) and manilla tags with people's names on them at each place. This is genius. Because, as I've said, Mary-Berry is a genius (I wanted to write Mary-Barry so she could be Mary-BarryWhite). It's going to be stellar I tell you. STELLAR.

bottles, tags and the flowers are rockroses, which are lovely and grow like crazy in southern PA in the summer

Table

image by Lisa Lefkowitz

So lovely. Lovely lovely lovely.

Bottles

Weddings in a barn allow you to do different things than weddings in a posh restaurant. One of these things is long tables in rows and bottles down the middle of different sizes and styles filled with wild flowers and flowers bought from the wholesale flower people that look like they might be wild. And candles that I pour myself (with the help from a sister-in-law or two) in funky jars. So now I am collecting bottles and funky jars (Bonne Maman jars are awesome, leave me alone) and trying to think of different kinds of lovely lovely flowers to put in them.

My relationship with Weeder's Digest has become straight up uncomfortable. I just love those tousely wildy flowers so very very very much. I want heaps of them around all the time. Especially in the wedding universe.

Or or or

Or I could find a way to plant heaps of wild flowers around the barn and maybe do flower beds where people are going to be walking up to the barn......

more at Maya's Flickr found via another fantastic Hannah at Seeds and Stitches