How to Decorate Your Wedding with Farmer's Market Flowers
Sheffield Admin Monday, March 26, 2012 at 9:00AM 
If you're thinking of great wedding inspiration for the coming spring season, look no further than 100 Layer Cake - one of our favorite wedding blogs. They cover a variety of weddings and feature top wedding vendors, from the best photographers to the best florists. And we also love their do-it-yourself projects. This one is all about how to decorate your wedding with inexpensive - yet so lovely! - flowers straight from a farmer's market.
Let’s preface this post by making it very clear that we are NOT florists of any kind. So clearly our decorations are not as lovely and polished as the professional florists we all admire so much. But, that’s kind of the point. If you’re willing to put a little time in, and get a little dirty, you (or your family/friends) can do your own flowers without as much hassle as you might think.
We gave ourselves a budget of $100 at the farmer’s market. We used our painted mason jars and a collection of vintage white pottery for vessels, and luckily had a box of flower foam in the garage. Which made this project pretty darn easy, inexpensive, and super super fun.
One little bit of advice … before you hit the market, we’d recommend having a clear idea of the colors and flowers you’re planning to bring home. You can always go to the market in the weeks before your event to scope out what’s going to be available. But of course weather is a big factor when it comes to local flowers, so you’ll have to be a bit flexible.
Our colors for our table were black, white, neon pink, and gold. So we decided to use mostly white flowers with a bit of soft pink. We ended up with hydrangeas, dahlias, baby’s breath, tuberose, white button chrysanthemum, and gorgeous gorgeous lisianthus.
If you’re going to use florist foam (which is a good idea if you plan to arrange these a day or two before the wedding), you’ll need to soak it in water for a few minutes. It also helps give you more control over the design of your arrangements.
Cut the foam into chunks that will fit into your vessels. You might need to use a few small pieces wedged together in order to fill each vase.
Then comes the fun part! As you go, (or before you start, if you’re organized) strip the leaves from each stem so you’re just left with the blooms. That is, unless you want your arrangements to be more green. Then by all means, leave the leaves!
And arrange your flowers however you like. We got into grouping like flowers together, but that part is totally up to you. It also seemed to help to add the bigger blooms first (like hydrangea), since those will really define the shape of your arrangement.
Get creative, try different things, and seriously just have fun! When you’re finished, make sure your vases have plenty of water so your arrangements don’t get droopy overnight. It seemed to us that making them one day ahead was fine, but by the third day, things weren’t looking as fresh.
You can see our final tablescape here and here with our flowers in place.
And for the curious, our total cost for flowers kept to our $100 budget, our mason jars were probably another $20, and we spent about 2–3 hours putting 10 arrangements together. If you had more hands, you could probably knock out flowers for your whole wedding in not much longer.
Thanks to 100 Layer Cake for the beautiful photographs, posts, and wedding inspiration. 100 Layer Cake is a unique, comprehensive wedding planning resource for and by thoughtful, crafty modern women. Their vendors, projects, weddings, resources, sponsors, and marketplace are hand-picked and thoroughly researched with the hope that every single one is a truly unique addition to both your wedding and your planning process. Visit the 100 Layer Cake website today.
If you're interested in learning more about wedding planning and decor, we encourage you to explore the Sheffield School, New York, NY. Sheffield began as an Interior Design school in 1985, and then expanded our course offerings to train people in other design-related fields, including Feng Shui, Wedding and Event Planning, and Jewelry Design. With thousands of active students and more than 50,000 graduates, Sheffield has trained more design professionals than any school in the world.
DIY, decorating, flowers in Weddings
Reader Comments (14)
Flowers can be very expensive, and this is an excellent way of getting a good result, while watching the budget. I'll forward this to some of my clients to show them what's possible.
much success with the site further
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