Just Days Before 'I Do': DIY Flower Arranging Isn't For Sissies

After a fun Wednesday night, I woke up early Thursday morning, and spent some time making sure everyone at our house was alive and awake, before heading to mom’s to start arranging the flowers we had bought the previous morning. As it turned out, I was the only person not in any pain from partying the night before, and had actually gotten more sleep Wednesday night than any other night the previous week! My bridesmaid stayed behind at our house to recover, and the guy’s plan for the day was to go pick up another groomsman at the airport, give him a tour of San Francisco, get the Uhaul truck to the hotel, and check us in.

Once I grabbed coffee, I joined the flower arranging party. I was trusted with the very challenging 21 cocktail table/inside table arrangements, but even I, with my black thumb, could handle rocks, an orchid, two leaves and water in a small vase!


In the 6 hours I was around to help we managed to finish a little less than half the flowers--all the small table centerpieces (except for sandwiching the sliced limes between the inner and outer vases, which happened closer to the wedding), cocktail and indoor table arrangements, bridesmaid purse bouquets, my ceremony and toss bouquets, ceremony aisle arrangements, and got started on arranging the tall centerpieces.

Here's a couple sneak peeks of the finished small table arrangements, taken on our wedding day by my bridesmaid, Heather:


My mom and aunt, who had taken professional floral arranging classes at a nearby college did most of the work though, and I'm pretty sure we couldn't have pulled this off without them knowing what they were doing. Just having the right supplies (foam, wire, etc) is so important--wedding flower arranging is so much more than just stuffing some stems in a vase! You need to have a game plan for timing and storage, have done mock ups so you buy enough flowers, and have an understanding of how to balance the colors and textures you're using in the arrangements.

My great aunt and I tried the best we could to assist by taking leaves off of stems, watering finished arrangements, tying ribbon to hang the aisle arrangements, and putting leaves in the floral foam so the arranging experts could place flowers around them. My mom and aunt did a wonderful job, as you’ll see more of in my day-of recaps. So many of our wedding guests commented on our flowers, and were shocked to find out they were 100% DIY.


One of the bridesmaid purse bouquets:


My gorgeous bouquet:


At some point in there we ate lunch and my sister, her boyfriend (also our ceremony guitarist and DJ) and her dog arrived from Washington. Before I knew it it was 3:30pm, so I loaded my wedding dress and veil into my car, and headed down the hill to meet Mr. Cola at the hotel. I only had an hour left to unpack and change before we were kicking off the weekend with our Wedding Party Welcome Event!

Miss any wedding week details? Catch up here:

- I packed an emergency bag that saved my dress
- We had a crazy 4 days prepping for house guests and stuffing favors
- Shopping for a ton of wedding flowers to arrange ourselves
- Mr. Cola drinks a 40 and I have a night out on the town for our low-key bach parties

(all pictures in this post are personal photos, taken by myself, my family, or our wedding party)

Just Days Before 'I Do': Girls Night Out/Guys Night In

The Wednesday afternoon before our wedding, after leaving the freshly purchased wedding flowers prep to my family, Mr. Cola and I, along with three members of our wedding party grabbed lunch, and then loaded all of this into our Uhaul truck and the trunks of our two cars.


At this point I was beginning to feel like a zombie again, since I’d only had about 8 total hours of sleep in the past 72 hours, so I went and tried to take a nap, while the guys went to the store to stock up on drinks for that night. They were going to hang out at our house and play pool, while my BM Heather had a night out planned for the two of us.

This is what was already going on when I woke up from my short nap. They'd apparently gotten an early start!


We ordered take out for dinner, and then my BM and I got dressed for going out. She had arranged for a town car to drive us around for the night!


After stopping at an ATM, and backtracking to my house to get my driver’s license (duh, fancy bars actually check these things, unlike my usual dive bar haunts), we sampled some of the wine our driver had provided.


We hit one bar in downtown San Jose, two on Santana Row, and then one up in Palo Alto, over the course of about 5 hours. I’ll let the photos speak for themselves!

(Our driver bought us roses between one of our stops.)

It was a great night of yummy drinks and lots of girlie fun! Until, that is, on our drive home, about ten minutes from my house.…let’s just say, my BM decided she didn’t like her drinks anymore, and I sacrificed my sweater. And her purse ended up having to be thrown in the garbage the next morning. Ah, good times! :)

Miss any wedding week details? Catch up here:

- I packed an emergency bag that saved my dress
- We had a crazy 4 days prepping for house guests and stuffing favors
- Shopping for a ton of wedding flowers to arrange ourselves

(unless otherwise noted, all pictures in this post are personal photos, taken by myself or our wedding party)

Just Days Before 'I Do': DIY Flower Shopping

The Wednesday before our wedding was an early one! I picked up our 10 foot Uhaul truck at 7:30am, and Mr. Cola and a groomsman loaded it with all the stuff we needed to take to my mom’s house, like our patio table, mini fridge, Styrofoam boxes, ice packs, etc. The table was for our Sunday-after lunch, and the rest was for storing all our wedding flowers.

(Me, waiting to get going in the truck, checking my Weddingbee comments, of course!)

Then it was time for BM Heather and I to head up to my mom’s in the Uhaul. Let me tell you, driving this truck wasn’t easy. I’d never driven a Uhaul before, and had to sit up very straight to see over the steering wheel!


We left the Uhaul at my mom’s house, and drove in two SUVs up to San Francisco with my mom, aunt, and great aunt, on a mission to buy a ton of flowers for not a ton of money at the Flower Market. We got to go in earlier than the general public because my mom still had her badge from her floral arranging classes.

(Wow, can you believe I’m not wearing heels? Weird, I know! But my mom said I should wear jeans and tennis shoes, and bring a sweatshirt, because the market is chilly and wet. My response was, “Ok, cute sundress, sweater and platform slip on tennis shoes it is!”)

Upon entering the Flower Market, we were bombarded by the sight of flowers EVERYWHERE! For what felt like miles and miles!

(I kind of had the urge to skip up and down the aisles--so many flowers!)

We walked from flower vendor to flower vendor, my mom and aunt clutching their flower shopping lists, and jotting down prices. Luckily I was a very relaxed bride about my flower selections (I liked purple and green, not many roses or pokey looking mums, and that’s about as picky as I got), which you really have to be if you’re DIY’ing all your own flowers. I kept getting asked, “do you like these," “what do you think about this bunch of flowers,” and "what about these ones" and pretty much my answers were, “sure,” “looks great,” and “sounds good.” Finally, after about an hour and a half of looking and looking at flowers, it was time to start making some purchases!

(I thought of Mrs. Pug, with all the California artichokes we saw)

My BM found the perfect shade of purple orchids, so we started with buying those. Then came hydrangeas, bells of Ireland, statice, and…..ok, I’m a fail bride when it comes to flowers! I don’t know all the types we bought, but they sure were pretty!


After about two and a half hours at the Flower Market, our cart was fully loaded of wedding flowers; everything to make all the centerpieces, cocktail table arrangements, ceremony flowers, bouquets, corsages, boutonnieres, pretty much all flowers except for the aisle petals, which we ordered online from Fifty Flowers. And guess what? We spent less than $200 for all of this pictured below! Combined with about another $200 in supplies (tons of vases, floral foam, floral tape, wire, ribbon, etc), and $200 for 260 cups of rose petals, we came in at under $600 for our floral budget. Of course, I’m not including the time spent making all the arrangements, and time and cost for my mom and aunt to attend floral arranging classes at a nearby college (which I might recommend to anyone trying to DIY more than a few of your wedding flowers, since as you will see, our flowers were a bit more advanced than most DIY wedding flower arrangements I’ve seen).


We pulled around the cars, loaded up everything, and headed back to my mom’s house to unload.


After filling buckets with water and flower food in my mom’s garage, my BM and I were going to stay to help with cutting off the tips of the flower stems and putting them in water to open overnight. But we got persuaded otherwise, by the guys.

Where was Mr. Cola and two of our groomsmen while we were flower shopping, you ask? Well, they had been tasked with two very important errands, dropping off all our out of town guest boxes at the hotel, and picking up Its Its ice cream sandwiches for our rehearsal dinner dessert (another local San Francisco treat, similar to how our wedding favors were all San Francisco snacks).

Mr. C and the GM met us at my mom’s, where we would be storing the Its Its in their full sized freezer until Friday night. And as it turns out, they were all starving, being how it was about 12:30 in the afternoon at this point. And so was BM Heather and I, since we’d only really had coffee all day. So everyone convinced me that we needed to take off, and leave all the flower prep to my mom and family. We definitely had a full afternoon and night (and early into Thursday morning!) ahead of us, so I’m glad we left when we did!

Miss any wedding week details? Catch up here:

- I packed an emergency bag that saved my dress
- We had a crazy 4 days prepping for house guests and stuffing favors

(unless otherwise noted, all pictures in this post are personal photos, taken by myself, my family or wedding party)

Just Days Before 'I Do': Running Around Like Crazy People

The weekend before our wedding is when the madness started.

A bunch of it is a blur to me, partly because of the fact that I was only able to get 3 or 4 hours of sleep each night the weeks leading up to our wedding, but also partly because I felt like we were moving a thousand miles a minute. The Cola house was a flurry of activity, and we spent a good two full days doing nothing but cleaning our home.

I’m not even kidding, it was that bad. Paper scraps, ribbon pieces, cat fur—our house was a tornado of wedding crafting supplies and trash, and it was a huge amount of work to get it cleaned. But as stressful as it was, it had to be done, because some of our wedding party was coming to town Tuesday night and staying with us for a couple nights.

(Side note: if you can avoid it, I would recommend against having people stay at your house right before your wedding. Cleaning for and entertaining guests adds a huge amount of stress, especially if you’re the type of person who always strives to be a good hostess, like I am. We had a lot of fun with our friends once they got here, so I totally don’t regret it, but it was a lot of work and stress leading up to when they arrived. I may or may not have snapped at one of my bridesmaids, via text, while she was waiting to board her plane to fly here….something along the lines of “You’ve already had TWO WEDDINGS, you should know how stressed I am.” Yeah, not a proud moment. Luckily she was understanding and texted me back something along the lines of how they were ready to help with whatever we needed, and would be our “wedding ninjas.”)

Mr. Cola had to work the Monday and Tuesday before our wedding, while I continued to zip around in a crazed daze, calling and emailing a million people and vendors to re-re-re confirm things, spending about 4 hours ironing all the clothes we both would wear for the rest of the week, finalizing my vows, checking and re-checking my mile long lists, putting together my emergency bag and packing for our Thursday through Sunday hotel stay, getting our cars cleaned and detailed for ferrying people around, getting a facial and wax at a salon (which was supposed to be an excuse to de-stress, but I ended up just feeling like it was a waste of time, I was greasy and gross after the facial, and immediately went home and showered off), and having to take loads of garbage to Mr. C’s work dumpster because we had too much to fit in our garbage can.

So pretty much from the Saturday through Tuesday afternoon before our wedding I was a sweaty, stressed, sleep deprived mess. I’m pretty sure there wasn’t a way around this either, most everything that could have done in advance had been done, but there were still just so many things that I couldn’t do until the week before when I finally had time off work.

Mr. C got off of work late Tuesday afternoon and spent some time finalizing his own vows while I started working on our favors. Back in October I’d decorated our favor boxes and made signs for the favors table, but since we were doing edible favors, the rest had to be left to the last minute. As a reminder, here is a picture of the mock up of our favor table I did last fall.

For our San Francisco White Cheddar Popcorn favor, we bought two big bags of the popcorn, and had to re-package it into small bags that would fit in our decorated boxes. I used a measuring cup to scoop out the popcorn, putting about 2 ½ cups in each favor bag.
(ZOMG, look, no cutting mat or other junk on our coffee table, and you can actually see the floor in our TV room!)

I also had made little stickers for the favor bags ahead of time by printing them out on sticker paper with my printer. I wanted to make sure people knew the popcorn was from San Francisco!

After stuffing 40 clear bags of popcorn, I had to put them in their pre-decorated boxes, which I sealed at the top using two punched flowers and a small brad.

By this time Mr. Cola had finished his vows (although I suspect he didn’t get choked up writing his like I did when writing mine!), and he kindly went and got us Arby’s sandwiches for dinner. Because yet again, I had forgotten to eat all day. After dinner he helped stuff our remaining favors, Ghiradelli Chocolates in gable boxes and San Francisco Cookie Company Chocolate Chip Cookies in square boxes.

After all the 120 favors were ready for our guests, we packed them in boxes and just as we were taping the boxes shut, three members of our wedding party arrived. They had great timing, although I only managed to hang out with them for an hour or so, I was falling asleep tired by 10pm and had to head to bed early! Wednesday was going to be a big day, with an early morning wake up call!