100 Layer Cake

Hiya! More Hitched projects for you today. Our flowers. Let’s preface this post by making it very clear that we are NOT florists of any kind. So clearly ours are not as lovely and polished as the professional ladies 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.

Now, on to the project.

Our colors for our Hitched 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 over night. 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 was $100, 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.

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