Wedding Decoration Details: Flowers & Vases

Having had a budget wedding that was a mixture between rustic and chic styles, I decided to hand craft the majority of my table centerpiece flowers.  I used fabric, ribbon, and pinecones for the flowers, and old food jars and bottles for vases.  This is an extremely budget concious decorating option for brides who are interested in rustic or chic wedding styles!

Handmade Flowers

Burlap and Lace Flowers
Back when I was just beginning my wedding planning, I saw a really cool tutorial for making a burlap flower table centerpiece.  I was inspired, and from there my wedding decorations progressed.

I started by copying her tutorial in burlap and lace...

hers look better than mine, but my excuse is that I made a lot of flowers with limited time per piece.

Ribbon Flowers
After I had made a lot of burlap and lace flowers, I thought of a new idea.
Use ribbon.

This was a lot easier to do than the burlap and lace, and I LOVED how chic they were.

Pine Pebble Flowers

buy these here

Long after I had been making burlap, lace and ribbon flowers, I was experimenting with pinecones.  I came up with the pinecone boutineers that our groomsmen and family wore at the wedding, as well as the pine-pebble flowers.

Vases

We recycled for pretty much every vase we had at the wedding.
Instead of going out to buy tons of jars, or identical vases, we used recycled glass jars that once stored food.

These are a bunch of jars that I had just cleaned to start the preparations to make them cute vases for our wedding centerpieces.  Some are the Starbucks Frappucino bottles, some are pasta sauce jars, jelly jars, glass pop bottles.  We collected many of these ourselves, and many friends donated their jars to us as well!

This is what I did with the vases.  I didn't want to stick to doing just one particular thing to them, so I made their decor unique - just as each bottle was unique.  To keep with a theme, I used only burlap, twine, lace, pearls, and ribbon as my materials.

The End Result

The flowers and vases together.

I also mixed my handmade flowers with cheap acrylic flowers.  I wanted to have the chic look off the handmade flowers mixed with the springy colors of the acrylic flowers.

Besides the artificial flowers, we picked some wildflowers from behind the lodge to fill some empty vases.  Some might just call them weeds, but I think they are gorgeous!

I also turned this log into a wedding decoration.  My cousin had brought it to a family cook out, and I saved it from the fire because it was awesome and had a hole in the middle.  After filling it with styrofoam, I filled it with the handmade flowers and some acrylic flowers.

My favorites of the ribbon flowers were the little pink ones made out of the ribbed ribbon.

And those were our wedding flowers!  Nearly free, besides purchasing the ribbon and eating food (to get the jars)!

Oh, and friends are super helpful in obtaining empty jars!  Thank you, lovely friends!

P.S.  While I am not actively trying to sell these flowers or vases, I am very open to working with anyone who would like to.  Just email me or request a custom order through my Etsy shop.  Please remember if you would like to purchase these for a wedding, it is quite a time consuming process, so I will need plenty of advance notice.