10 Days : Flowers #marriedmay

It seemed only fitting that today, as party of #marriedmay (a lovely hashtag created by Phoebe over at So You're Getting Married) I share an update on our flowers.

I share my favourite flower with Blair Waldorf - Peonies.

A few months back, I wrote a post about my struggle with all things floral for our wedding.

Thankfully my mother-in-law to be, Marie came to our rescue.

She recommended a fantastic florist and friend Sharon at Occasions Floral Design, who we met with at the start of March.

Sharon listened to our ideas for the wedding and was happy to make suggestions but ultimate take our lead on the flowers. I'd drawn some sketches of what I'd like the arrangements to look like, not the easiest way to select flowers for your wedding!!

As we really wanted to do the flowers ourselves, but we were going to struggle with executing this successful, so she agreed help us by doing as much or as little as we wanted.

We decided that Sharon (and Joan) would create some hand tied bouquets for Fiona, Jenny and I. These bouquets will be photographed a lot and we wanted them to look beautiful for the whole day.  They are also going to provide flowers for us to arrange on the tables. They've been a fantastic help at guiding my quantities and suggesting the best flowers to create the soft natural, hand picked looks we wanted. They are going to prep and condition the flowers for us and deliver them to the venue where we will still have the opportunity to arrange for the tables.

Some of the types of flowers we are using are;
Peonies
Roses
Carnations
Gypsophila
Wax flower
Ornithagalum
Lisinathus
Hydrangea
Veronica

I can't wait to see the final arrangements!

Amy
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219 Days: Haughty Culture*

I have an app on my phone called 'WeddingHappy'.  I downloaded it after watching this PopSugar Video on Best Wedding Planning Apps. It's not an app I use religiously but it is useful.  It creates a personal timeline of tasks based on your wedding date.  It has a great 'countdown to the wedding' function (which is useful for titling blog posts) and would be handy for brides-to-be on the go to keep track of supplier details and appointments. You can even add a certain number of your own tasks and deadlines on the free version.  Once you've completed a task you mark it 'done' and it drops off the list.  

Top of its list of things I should have done by now is 'Book Florist' which is way past it's deadline and is now marked, in bright red letters as 'Complete as soon as possible'.

So...I guess it's about time that I share with you some ideas we've had on flowers and foliage for our wedding. 

When Jim and I lived in Belfast we didn't have a garden. We did have a 'beautiful' communal alley, full of bins, which overlooked a train line but this surprisingly didn't inspire us to be particularly horticultural.  We did grow a chilli plant indoors, but as we lived in an end terrace there was a ridiculous daily ritual of moving the pot from the front of the house to the back to maximise its time in the sun!!

Jim has always been more interested in gardening than I have and, ever practical, he grew lots of vegetables in a local community garden - mostly potatoes and red lettuce as the slugs seem to leave those alone.

Out the back of our new house in Leicester we have a little paved sun trap which means we have no excuse not to grow something!  This year, alongside some particularly vigorous mint (for mojitos obviously) I planted some freesia and some gladioli.  The freesias never appeared (Jim's mum informed me they are quite hard to grow) but at the end of August these beautiful pink galdioli appeared.

At the weekend I spent some time weeding some of our flower beds and I've planted some heather in what I hope will become a sort of wild flower bed. 

With most other aspects of our wedding I feel completely comfortable but I know next to nothing about flowers and floral arranging.  So although WeddingHappy (and I) felt a post on flowers was due, I have really struggled to write it.

I can definitely appreciate beautiful floral arrangements and have a few favourite flowers but because we would prefer to arrange the flowers ourselves I'm searching for the right place to start.

So far we think we'd like to avoid anything too formal or arranged, preferring the natural, more hand picked arrangements.  I love gypsophila (Jim also likes this as he read somewhere that it is pretty cheap!), lavender, white and green hydrangeas, and peonies. 

I'm really lucky to have Jim's mum to advise on what's in season and recognise all the random flowers I photograph and send to her. 

We like the idea of mixing potted plants in amount the arrangements and where possible sourcing in season flowers from the local area rather and than shipping in a million frozen tulips from Amsterdam.  

Our spare room currently houses our extensive recycled glassware collection and a few friends and family members have also started a similar collection on our behalf. We'd like to use as many recycled and upcycled pieces in our wedding decorations as possible.

Below are some pictures from our floral mood board.

So although we're not totally decided on what flowers we will, writing this post has definitely helped and has shown us that maybe, we have more of an idea of what we would like that we thought!
*Haughty Culture...Horticulture lol

** some pictures my own, others from magazines or online searches.

Bank Holiday Weekend Fun

I had planned to write about my 'Vegan Cupcake Bake-Off' but the sunny Bank Holiday weather tempted me outside and kept me there!

Instead I'm going to share some of the wedding-y bits and pieces I got up to this weekend with my friend Caoimhe and some lovely things I saw that I think would make great venue or table decorations.

First was a trip to Ikea in Milton Keynes as I needed some storage boxes.  While there I spotted these gorgeous plant pots.

We like the idea of having living plants as decorations and if we do I thought these would be a great way to disguise a plastic pot. They are only £2 - bargain!  (view online)

I also loved these gorgeous paper lanterns (£4  - Ikea) I think you can get round versions of these lampshades online in lots of different colours online but I liked the unique shape of this Ikea version. I think these would look great hung at different heights like this in a wedding venue with high ceilings and would look gorgeous both lit, or unlit. We haven't picked colours for the wedding yet but I picked up a bluey-green one for our spare bedroom.

The weekend's adventures continued on Sunday at Hertfordshire County Show. We had a great afternoon in the sunshine wandering between the different marquees and watching some stunt biking and JCB relay racing. There wasn't a great selection of veggie foods, as you can imagine, but I picked up a Hot Chipotle Sauce from Capsicana for James .

I'm always saving pictures of flowers and floral arrangements I like from magazines and the internet.  I believe these 'Rhapsody in Blue' start out in this gorgeous purple but fade to a slate blue. I love the purple against the terracotta pot.

Speaking of living plants - how gorgeous are these succulents.  They would make the cutest little wedding favours.  I love the colours! 

   

With the excuse of post-wedding drinks reception research, we sampled some Raspberry Liquor from the English Spirit Distillery. I don't see it on their website but it was really nice, particularly with lemonade and a slice of lime.  They also create bespoke liquors, so you can pick the flavours and they'll create it - a great idea if you're creating a signature cocktail for your wedding day. We also tried some toffee vodka. I'm not a big vodka fan but this was quite nice (Thunder Vodka).

I also put in a call to Table 10 Event Hire to enquire about some chairs for the wedding.  As our guest list is Riverdale's capacity it was suggested that we look at hiring Chivari chairs as they are a bit narrower.  As I'm a not big fan of chair covers and would much prefer to have nice looking chair, the lime washed Chivari are perfect.!

What did you get up to on your Bank Holiday weekend? 

Amy

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