Goal #52: Buy flowers at the farmers market

For a while, I've been wanting to arrange the flowers for our wedding myself (with the help of several lovely people to whom I'll be extremely grateful). Florists are crazy expensive, and my thought is "how hard can it be?" I gave it a try on Sunday, since it'll soon be cold and they won't be selling flowers at the farmers market.

My favorite flowers are dahlias:

This arrangement isn't by me. I'm just showing you how pretty dahlias are.

I really wanted to get those, but the first stand we went to didn't have any, so I assumed no one else would either. I just bought some zinnias for $6. It was cheap, that's good, but I was sad when I saw beautiful dahlias later on. Maybe next weekend...

Here's what I did. I've done some reading on what you're supposed to do to make them last longer, and these were the things that I remembered.

First I pulled off all of the leaves.

Then I clipped off the ends of the stems under running water, and put them in a vase with water.

I used half of them to make a bouquet, and half for a centerpiece. The centerpiece is awesome, and exactly what I want. The bouquet needs some practice - but that also has to do with me not loving zinnias. Next time I'll definitely make sure to buy the right type of flowers.

Here are the centerpieces:

Thank you Ikea for 100 tealights for $4!

I love them! They'll look even better with roses and dahlias. I don't really have detailed instructions. I just cut the stems to the right length, and put them in the mason jars (which is what I want to use at our wedding. I need to start collecting 3 different sizes for each table). It was easy :)

For the bouquet, I taped together groups of 3-4 flowers with floral tape (err, duct tape. I need to buy floral tape).

Once I had enough smaller groups of flowers, I taped them all together into a larger bouquet at the top and bottom.

This bouquet has about 30 zinnias and it's smaller than I'd like. I would have added more but I wanted to save enough for the vases.

I wrapped the stems with ribbon that I had already, and secured it with a pin. I'll buy prettier ribbon later.

I think it went pretty well for my first go at DIY flowers! I'm confident that this will work out and we'll save hundreds of dollars.

I spent about an hour or less on this. I think with more people we should be able to do more centerpieces quickly.

I'm actually looking forward to doing this with my mom - I think it'll be fun :)

P.S. click here for my list of 100 goals to accomplish before my 30th birthday (buy flowers at the farmers market was one of them).

Update: I put these together Sunday and it's now Tuesday. They still look good. Yay :)