How to Decorate Your Wedding with Farmer's Market Flowers

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

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Make Giant Do-It-Yourself Paper Wedding Flowers

This is a really exciting post.

Remember Brittany and Paul’s super cute, ultra whimsical wedding - the one with the HUGE PAPER FLOWERS?

Yes, of course you do. 

Well, Brittany sent us over a tutorial!

Hooray!!!! Now we can all cover our houses or decorate our weddings in huge paper flowers and we will be happy all the time.

Here’s the scoop from Brittany:

“From the get-go, I wanted large paper flowers to create a Thumblina/Alice in Wonderland-ish effect for our garden reception. My amazing mom came up with the brilliant centerpieces by creating a pattern, which we then duplicated about 30 times for all the centerpieces, walkways, and stairs. The great thing about paper flowers is that we could create them with plenty of time before the wedding without worrying about the wilting. That said, by the wedding day we then had 30 huge paper poppies “growing” in our house and we were plenty ready to get them out! Making the flowers is easy as pie. You’ll need a large surface to work on because these babies are quite large."

1. The base of the flower is 9” wide so you can start by marking the middle of the short end of the paper at the 9” mark and then marking 4½ inches out on either side.

2. Create the shape of the petal. You can either copy this picture and blow it up to the right size or create your own. (I drew it in marker here to so it would be clearer, but use pencil to be more inconspicuous.) It’s roughly the shape of a light bulb or shell with lots of undulating waves (you don’t want them to be too precise ...  they’re flowers!) From the 9” mark on the short side of the paper draw a 5” line up the middle.

3. Cut the shapes out.

4. Create the texture for the petal. We kept it simple by simply folding the paper over the ruler from the widest rim to the center of the shortest side. Space them out about every 1-1 ½ inches. Remember not to be too precise. Then, turn the petal over and turn every other fold the opposite way like an accordian fold. It might look a little too much like a sea shell at this point, but don’t worry, it gets better.

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