A hint of Wildflowers

Wednesday night, Emily and I stepped out of our comfort zones to try something entirely new.  There had been a lot of discussions about wedding flowers, and it really annoys me how expensive they are.  Lo and behold, my mom sees an article about a floral shop about an hour away that teaches DIY bridal flower courses, and offers to sell you the flowers at a super-low rate.  SCORE!  Our flowers are simple, and it burned my biscuits that these florists wanted $150+ for a bridal bouquet.  Shoot.

So for $90 each, Emily and I went and spent 3 hours learning the fine art of wedding flower arrangements.  At the end of the night, we had made centerpieces and bridal bouquets.  We also learned how to professionally process flowers, so that they last much longer.

Finished bouquet

Completed centerpieces.

In all reality, the flower arrangements we created in class were beautiful, but not for my wedding.  We learned some fantastic techniques, like how to grid an arrangement, but we didn't work with a lot of materials that I had hoped to use in my own arrangements.  When I explained the look we are going for in my wedding, I told her I wanted Daisies, and a picnic type arrangement.  She told me that would be really hard, and that the end product would be a wildflower-type bouquet.

Which made me think of this fantastic YouTube video:

I love the wildflower look.  I think it's super fitting with the theme of my wedding.  And if it makes more work for Emily and I, so be it.  Nothing about my wedding thus far has been about taking "the easy road".  This is a wedding of details, and I love that.  So basically, I'm the dude yelling "Wildflower" at his dinner.  And I'm not sorry.

What were your wedding flowers like?

New and Blue

I'm slowly falling in love with the tradition of "something old, new, borrowed, and blue".  Traditions aren't necessarily something that is important to me, especially superstitious traditions, but for whatever reason, I like this one.

While my bridal party was in town last weekend, we went on a mission to find shoes and jewelry for the Bridesmaids.  Well, beads for the jewelry, since my mom is making custom jewelry for all of the girls.  But what we're really talking about today is the shoes.  We decided to hit up Off Broadway Shoes, on the recommendation of the best Maid of Honor there ever was.

Our main goal was to find shoes for the bridesmaids so that we could take accurate dress fitting measurements over the weekend as well.  Apparently, shoes are incredibly important to tea length dress fittings.  We were successful.  So successful, in fact, that 6 different WOMEN agreed upon the perfection of one pair of shoes.  Can you believe that math?  I couldn't, especially since it's pretty much the only thing we all agreed upon for the whole weekend.  Here are the winners:

They are beyond perfection.  The cloth part is actually a mesh with the flowers embroidered in.  And they are romantic and subtle, everything that a bridesmaid's outfit should be (in my opinion.  No magenta up in here!).

There was a secondary goal that day too:  Find this bride to be some shoes for her special day!  I knew I wanted something not too tall, colored, and more delicate.  The skirt of my dress is going to be a very full tea length, and I wanted something sweet peeking out underneath. 

I love that they're shiny.  I love that they're sling-backs.  Ammon loves that they're blue.  We both love that the heel isn't too terribly high.  In short, they're practically pefect in every way.

Note to self:  get some color prior to the wedding day.

We also found some adorable shoes for me to wear for the reception, seeing as there is no way I'm wearing heels for 5 hours.  But they're going to stay a secret for now, since I forgot to take a picture, and I'm too lazy to pull them out for a blog post.  Secret shoes are fun, right???

So those are the wedding shoes!  We love them, I hope you do too.