With a little creativity, some planning, and a DIY spirit, you can have stunning wedding flowers without the associated high cost. We specialise in providing glorious, eco friendly and sustainable wedding flowers for arranging at home. Grown on our Manchester flower farm, we can provide you masses of beautiful fresh flowers at your wedding for a fraction of the price.
The best way to source your wedding flowers is to seek out a flower grower local to you who supplies mixed buckets of flowers. Using mixed buckets is a cost effective way of getting a good mix of different flowers, rather than having to buy flowers in wraps of 10 or 20.
We grow a wide range of flowers on our micro flower farm on the outskirts of Manchester and our season runs between April and October. We love growing and supplying flowers for DIY weddings, we cannot guarantee 100 stems of the same flower, but we can usually cut to a colour pallette.
If you fancy having a go at your wedding flowers using our eco friendly seasonal blooms we have put together some useful tips and advice to help you get the most from your flowers and more importantly to make sure it is a fun and relaxing experience.
Top Tips for creating your own wedding flowers
If you decide to create your own wedding bouquet it is a good idea to do some research on the kind of bouquets you like and have a couple of practice runs. Don't be too ambitious, simple can be so impactful, especially when you are using beautiful seasonal Britsh flowers.
So you have chosen the flowers you would like, you now need to think about how, when and where you will be working with your flowers, will you collect them or have them delivered, where you will be arranging them (you will need a fair amount of space and ideally a cool dark room to store them and work in), who is going to help? Think about and plan the practicalities in advance this ensures that the flowers arrive at the right time, in the right place with the right people to help you. We would recommend having the flowers arrive two days before your wedding, so for a Saturday wedding have your flowers arrive Thursday morning, we explain more about timings further in the article.
When you have decided where you will work with your flowers, gather all the equipment you will need. You will need a good size, clear, worksurface, your vases and jam jars (clean), secateurs, buckets to store your flowers whilst you work, string to tie and ribbons to finish bouquets, maybe a bottle of something cold and bubbly...
Thinking about timescales, if you are getting married on Saturday, your flowers should be delivered on Thursday morning. We deliver flowers in our buckets which need to be returned, if you have buckets of your own get them clean and ready to transfer the flowers into. Set aside a couple of hours on Thursday afternoon to organise your flowers, you should have a think about which flowers you might use for different pieces, place flowers you want to use together next to each other etc. It is also a good idea to choose the flowers you would like in your bridal bouquet and place them together in a separate vessel/bucket. If you can have lots of spare vases/buckets for this as the more you can separate the flowers out the better. Organising the flowers in this way will save you so much time when you come to arrange them the next day.
Store the flowers overnight in a cool, dark place.
Arrange your flowers the day before the wedding, if you are arranging with your bridal party, gather them together and enjoy some creative fun. Remember simple designs can be the most beautiful and when you are working with gorgeous seasonal, local flowers, you cannot go too wrong. Simple hand tied bouquets and posies, jam jars and bud vases, not only look beautiful but are so versatile, as you can move them from ceremony room to the reception.
Finally, think about who is going to take the flowers to the venue for you and how they will be transported. Ideally one of the bridal party will do this for you and will know where to place each piece. You can then relax and look forward to the big day!
DIY Wedding Flower Workshops
If you are interested in creating your own wedding flowers, and would like a little more guidance, we offer DIY wedding flower workshops. This is an opportunity for you and your bridal party to visit the farm, pick some flowers and be guided through the process of creating hand tied wedding bouquets, button holes and simple vase and jam jar arrangements. This workshop makes a lovely bridal shower or hen party activity. You can find out more here.
A DIY Summer Wedding
The lovely Steph chose our flowers this Summer to create her wedding flowers.
Along with her bridal party she created her own bouquet, buttonholes, jam jars and meadow boxes.
Steph isn't a florist, however she loves flowers and had a passion for sourcing sustainable flowers for her wedding. After signing up for an on line bridal bouquet workshop she felt confident enough to get creative with her own flowers.
She chose a bright, meadow style look, so we cut buckets of bright beautiful flowers and delivered them to her house.
The pictures below show just what can be achieved.
Thanks to Steph Rory x
Images by Monica Chatterton
