A True Tale of a DIY Bride

When I first met Caitlin and her parents, I liked them instantly. Over coffee, we chatted about the vision they had for a beautiful, natural, outdoor wedding. Caitlin’s vintage, creative style was evident while she talked about wanting to do her own flowers.

Local Color Flowers loves providing locally grown cut flowers to clients that want to DIY their flowers. It’s fun for us because we get to pick a wide variety of flowers up from all the farms we go to and then let the clients get creative with the end product.

For anyone thinking about doing your own flowers, here is a great look at how much fun it can be!

Congratulations to Caitlin and Justin!

I DIY’d My Wedding Flowers

by Caitlin Gore

“When I first began telling people that I wanted to DIY (DIY= Do It Yourself) my own wedding flowers, they mostly looked at me like I had two heads. “Oh, are you SURE you want to do that?”, “I don’t think you’ll be able to do that with everything else going on.” they said. “Yes! It will be so much fun!” I insisted. (And fun it was.)

I don’t remember where I first got wind of the idea to put together one’s own wedding flowers (bouquets, centerpieces and all), but as soon as I thought about it, I knew it was the route for me. It also was a perfect fit for the style of wedding I was planning. Justin and I got married on a beautiful early May afternoon on a family friend’s farm in Crownsville, Maryland. Whenever people asked me about my “vision” for the wedding, I would shrug and say that I just wanted it to be natural and comfortable and beautiful. Tables lined with old jars filled with fresh picked flowers and rustic hand-tied bouquets, what could be more naturally beautiful than that?

And so on the Friday before our wedding, Ellen arrived bright and early to my parent’s house with a truckload of fresh cut buckets of flowers. I had a team of helpers at the ready including all three of my bridesmaids, both of my nieces, my mom, my mother-in-law, as well as lots of help from my pug and bulldog. We filled the kitchen with all of the buckets, lining every inch of counter space available. We had scissors and garden shears and floral tape and lots and lots of (and lots) of collected mason jars.

The first task was to put together my own bouquet so that I would have the first pick from everything. It was pretty simple really, I just went around from bucket to bucket, pulling out flowers that I liked and placing them in a vase. When it seemed like I had enough, I gathered them all in a bunch and arranged them a bit and then went right into wrapping the stems with floral tape (believe it or not, I had my husband there to help with this bit, it truly was a family affair). After wrapping the tape, we chopped off the excess stem, leaving about an inch of stems exposed below the tape, and then covered the tape with a cotton lace trim. I placed a few little pins in the top and bottom to secure the lace, and then it was done! No fancy tools or headaches required.

My bridesmaids then did their bouquets, and then we got to work filling all of the jars. My nieces (aka my flower girls, ages five and eight) had the most fun with this part. After every jar they filled they would call me over for approval. We worked for a few hours, storing the finished jars in boxes and putting the bouquets in water in the fridge. The kitchen was an absolute mess, but the amount of fun that we had made it worth it.

On the morning of our wedding I was out at the farm, running around bare foot helping my dad organize all of the flowers, showing where I wanted things to go and how things should look. We borrowed several shepherd’s hooks from LoCoFlo to line the aisle, each one with a jar of flowers hanging from it. I also acquired an old wooden ladder which I painted white and had at the altar, jars of flowers placed here and there along it. We set everything up ourselves, and then it was time to go.

And now, some flowers-in-action shots! The following images by photographer Lydia Jane.