How Planning My Own Wedding Made Me a Better Wedding Florist
If you’re planning your own wedding right now (or if you plan to be engaged soon!), you probably are feeling something like excitement mixed with overwhelm mixed with YIKES THAT’S WHAT THAT COSTS?? For many of us, this is the first time we’ve planned a huge event, navigating catering and menus and linens and arrival times and transportation and flowers and dress fittings and and and….
Now, maybe you’re an ultra fancy person who plans lots of large-scale events and this is all old hat for you. If that’s the case- go on with your bad self! You’re amazing!
But for many couples planning a wedding, this is a whole new world. You might have hosted a dinner party for ten people or had a Bat Mitzvah, so you know there are a lot of logistics that go into hosting. Multiply that for however many guests you’re having and you start to understand exponentially how much more challenging it will be to plan and host a wedding.
Now, don’t get me wrong. I loved a LOT of the wedding planning process! I got engaged right in the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic, so we picked a wedding date nearly two years out in 2022 to have plenty of time to plan. One thing that was invaluable to my now-husband and me was sitting down early on to identify the three most important elements of a wedding- this way, whenever things got overwhelming or we faced decision fatigue, we could return to those three core values and decide whether whatever we were stressing about served those goals.
For us, we actually both separately picked the exact same three elements: good food/drink, alone time together, and a fun dance party. Those were our tethers. This led us to some of our major decisions like investing in a venue that allowed us to custom create a menu with the in-house chef, including signature cocktails that reflected both of our personalities.
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Deciding on what to do about my wedding florals was a journey. Upon first getting engaged, I had the stellar idea to do my own wedding flowers; thank goodness I had several florist friends ask me if I was insane and realized that yes, I’d probably rather be sipping a glass of bubbly on the morning of my wedding and not building a chuppah. Luckily, I was able to still design the concept for all the wedding elements myself ahead of time, and I hired some floral designer friends to do the actual set up and execution. These friends were true rockstars, because they somehow managed to set up an entire wedding and then transform into wedding guests by the evening!
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From a budget perspective and an Earth perspective, sustainability was huge for us in our wedding planning! Here are a couple sustainable ways we designed our wedding:
1. Sourcing rugs from Facebook marketplace & Craigslist for the aisle.
This look was so important to us, so we spent months sourcing these one at a time. On the day of, they became our wedding aisle, then our venue amazingly flipped them into a dance floor. After the wedding, I sold them as a “complete aisle bundle” to another bride on a local wedding group.. Win win!
2. Pressing flowers for escort cards.
I saved flower heads from work and pressed them in books for months! I did end up sourcing some more pressed flowers from the amazing Lacie at Framed Florals, and the look was so special.
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Bonus: I dried my own flowers at home for individual dried flower bundles at each place setting.
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3. Drying flowers for confetti.
For two years, I meticulously dried petals from flower heads that came off in processing or normal design, focusing on high saturation flowers like marigold, delphinium, and strawflower. When the wedding got closer, I made paper cones and we gave these out to our guests for tossing at the end of our ceremony.
4. Donating our flowers after our event.
Luckily, our venue, Spillian, had a connection to a local organization, so we didn’t have to do much legwork on this. A couple great folks came during our brunch the day after our wedding, seamlessly rescued whatever flowers still looked beautiful, and took them to local nursing homes and hospitals. This was in the Catskills, but there are fabulous organizations like Bloom Again Brooklyn that do this exact kind of work here!
Our wedding flowers got to have a second life, and that made my heart so happy.
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Of course, there were a lot of less exciting elements to wedding planning, but it’s all part of the ride. We had a gorgeous day surrounded by our closest family and friends, and the most important takeaway was that it felt like us. This is what I always stress to the couples I work with: create something that feels like an organic extension of you two and the love you share, and it’ll always be a day you remember with warmth and love.
Happy planning!
