Tuesday, September 24, 2013

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

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.

14 comments:

  1. That all came together so nicely! I love the ribbon flowers!

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  2. You are very creative. Love what you did with those little jars and the flowers too!

    Ellya

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  3. Wow, girl. They are all so lovely! I'm impressed that you made them all for your wedding reception! :-)

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    1. Thanks Susannah! They were pretty time consuming, but luckily we had a year to plan everything!

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  4. These look so awesome and cute. They're perfect for autumn. I may have to use some of these ideas to decorate my apartment for the season. I just got really excited...haha!

    Thanks for sharing and thanks for linking up with Meet and Greet!

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    1. Haha, you're right, Tiffany! Everything in me actually wanted a Fall wedding...but unfortunately Spring for me more practical in terms of our leases, school, and everything else. So that's what we did.

      I brought out several burlap decoration leftovers around the apartment to make things look more fall-ish too! I've had the stump out for a while, but I do think it has an autumn feel!

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  5. I love how different and unique each centerpiece was, and yet how well they all worked together!

    We also diy-ed our centerpieces, although one with a lot less work. Our centerpieces were all wine bottles and while we did use fake flowers as well, each table was the same.

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    1. Thanks so much, Shoshanah! I didn't think having all identical centerpieces matched my personality, so I liked that a lot about the recycled jars! (I had a Chinese roommate, and sauce jars that come from the Asian market are so much more beautiful than normal supermarket jars, so I would always ask her to keep them for me when she was done! haha)

      Wine bottles are great! I think we had one or two in the mix somewhere, they're nice since you can use longer stems in them.

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  6. These are so elegant and wonderful!...Following you through Meet & Greet Blog Hop!

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