DIY Wedding Flowers - No Experience Required

I recently had the pleasure of attending a gorgeous wedding in the North Carolina mountains.  Many of the bride and groom's friends stayed together in the same house, at the location of the wedding.  Over the course of a weekend we all got to know each other, cook and eat meals together, and be a part of throwing a really rad party for our friends.

I've decided I'm kind of the best non-bridesmaid bridesmaid ever.  I've helped friends try on wedding dresses, organized bachelorette parties, and now created centerpieces, all without having to don a matching dress and heels.  And it's actually pretty great.

I've plunked grocery store bouquets into vases before, but that's about all the experience I brought to this latest adventure.  The bride and groom ordered buckets of flowers from a local farm.  While it's awesome to source locally, if you don't have that option you always have the internet.  Blooms by the Box also offers ready-made packages of flowers and greenery that take out much of the guess work. Having good material to work with is the first step in making beautiful arrangements.  Lucky for us, flowers are just darn pretty.

The next key is to have a cool place to store the flowers after you arrange them.  The top of a mountain in autumn is a good option, though not universally available.  To me this, and not skill or experience, is usually the biggest obstacle to DIY flowers.

To start, I gathered several larger blooms to anchor the centerpiece.  Then I added smaller flowers and more textured flowers at slightly different heights and filled in with greenery.  I usually gathered things in my hand first, and then cut stems to the appropriate height and added them to vases once I had the sense that what I had grabbed was sufficient.  Pretty much whenever a bridesmaid would hold up a bunch of flowers and say, "Is this missing something?"  I'd just suggest more greenery.  It gives everything a full, sophisticated, and complete look.

If you have a vase with a wide opening you can try something I saw on Pinterest that I confirmed actually works.  Use masking tape to make a grid over the opening.  This allows you to place the flowers without them all falling into the center of the bowl or vase.  The same rules about variety, heights, and greenery apply.  My attempt turned into my favorite arrangement of the night.