DIY Wedding Flowers – Bouquets, Boutonnieres & Corsages {Wedding Wednesday}

Some of you may know this, but before my mom had me she owned a cute little florist shop. Then us kids came along and she sold the shop but was always doing arrangements here and there for family, friends or our own holiday celebrations. While I was growing up, I always loved to make arrangements with her and since I’ve had the blog we’ve shared holiday centerpieces, DIY Wildflower Flower Mason Jar Wedding Centerpieces for my friends’ wedding and my personal favourite – Thanksgiving Pumpkin Flower Arrangements.

When we started talking about wedding plans there was only one person who I could think of doing my flowers – my mom. She has an amazing eye for colour and design, and thankfully she was up for the challenge.

This amazing supermom not only did my bouquet, but also 5 bridesmaids, a throwing bouquet, 9 boutonnieres, 4 corsages, 2 wristlets, 12 centerpieces and a handful of other arrangements around the wedding venue. And that’s not including all the other million things she helped me with.

This week I’m sharing the bouquets, boutonnieres, corsages and wristlets, and next week I’ll get into centerpieces, decor and even the cake flowers.

In the end, the flowers turned out just has I’d hoped – soft pastel colours with lots of texture and movement, with beautiful touches like berries, soft dusty miller leaves and grey satin ribbon tails.

 

Picking the Flowers Up

As soon as we knew we wanted to do the flowers ourselves, it meant finding somewhere to buy them wholesale. If you get them from a florist shop, they can be quite expensive with the mark up. Most wholesalers require you to have a business number, so I used my freelance work number and set up an account with a wholesaler in Toronto. They sent us their catalog a couple weeks before the wedding and we put an order in for roughly what we thought we needed.

A few days before the wedding, my mom and I made an early morning trip to the flower wholesaler to pick up our order. The wedding was the day before Mother’s Day, which meant we had to order some things in advance because there wasn’t much stock left. Others we could pick up from the cooler while we were there, like fillers and such.

They had coffee on hand and a friendly “guard dog” who was happy to steal the doughnuts off the counter when no one was looking.

It was really fun to go around and look at all the flowers they had available. If you were going for a bright colour palette, they had so much selection.

We were looking for softer pastel colours, so it took a little digging around to found some more flowers to add to our haul.

In the end, we left with BUCKETS of flowers. We got pink garden roses, white garden roses, ranunculus, hydrangea, pink baby carnations, white sweetheart roses, freesia, baby’s breath, berries, dusty miller leaves, filler leaves. Later on we picked up tulips from a grocery store as well.

Somehow we managed to fit them all in the backseat of the car and carefully drive them home…we didn’t want any bruising!

I went to work (it was still only 8am at this point), while my mom took all the flowers home to get them settled in. We wanted to give them a few days to open up because we were going for a more relaxed look. The roses went into the fridge in my parents’ rental property next door. It was set low to keep everything cool but not freeze the flowers.

Anything that didn’t need to go in the fridge went into the guest rooms. We kept the fireplace off to keep the place cool.

 

Bouquets

Out of all the flowers my mom did for the wedding, the bouquets were my favourite. They were full of beautiful flowers, in soft pastels and just looked so beautiful!

We also used the bouquets for the decor at the venue. My bouquet and the bridesmaids’ went in mercury glass vases on the head table, while the tossing bouquet sat up on the mantel with the DIY Moss Covered Letters.

My friend Alison flew in from Calgary to be a bridesmaid, but she also was a big help with the flowers.

 She cut off the thorns and pulled the bruised outer petals of all the roses.

Which was so nice because it gave my mom time to do what she does best – designing. We used this great tutorial video as inspiration and then built it from there, adding hydrangea, roses, ranunculus, berries and filler.

She would had a few flowers, then rap them with florist tape to keep them in place, then add a few more flowers and wrap. This kept the flowers from shifting out of place and gave it a firm base for me to hold on to.

Whiskey was on hand to supervise.

Each bouquet took her about 20-30 minutes and she made 7 (bride, 5 bridesmaids, tossing bouquet). Later on she wrapped the middle of bases with satin ribbon (pale pink for me and a soft dove grey for the bridesmaids).

They went back into the fridge in their mercury glass vases with plenty of water. The next day, we packaged the bouquets up in the vases in boxes and drove them out to the venue.

After the ceremony and photos, the flowers went back into their vases to sit at the head table. I loved how the vase was just the right size to keep them upright, instead of flopping to the side. I think they looked just as lovely as centerpieces as they did as bouquets!

 

Boutonnieres, Corsages & Wristlets

For the boustonnieres and corsages, we picked some of the nicest looking flowers, to give them a full look.

 Garrett’s was a big white garden rose with berries and dusty miller, while the groomsmens had white freesia.

This is one of my favourite little moments caught on camera – my mom pinning the boutonniere on my soon-to-be husband and welcoming him into the family.

The mothers wore matching wristlets (tied to their wrists with ribbon) and the fathers had white carnation boutonnieres.

All the grandparents and great aunts got their own corsages and boutonnieres with pink sweetheart roses and white mini carnations.

Here is my whole family showing everything – bouquets, corsages and wristlets. I loved how everything tied together with a simple colour pallette of white, ivory, soft pinks and greens.

A HUGE thank you goes out to my mom for all her amazing work and his tireless enthusiasm. She spent three full days working on all the flowers and it really brought everything together.