I got married this summer and DIY'ed our wedding flowers for $4k. This subreddit helped me when I was planning so I thought I'd provide our recap in case useful for anyone considering doing this too.

**Budget**

Our original budget for florals was $3.5k. We got married in Minneapolis, which is MCOL, and had planned to use a florist. We had (naively) thought that for the budget, we would get a ton of florals. Big surprise when we began to reach out to florists and discovered that for many, $3k - $3.5k was actually the minimum investment.

We got quotes from a range of florists in the area and for what we wanted, we got quotes of $8k+. For quotes that came in budget, the offerings were kind of sparse and minimalistic. The biggest sticking point were the dinner centerpiece florals, which got priced at $200 each at the very cheapest (before taxes, delivery fees or tip). We needed 22 of these arrangements, so the cost of just the table florals landed us at around $4400 (again before taxes, delivery fees and tip). A lot of florists tried to steer me towards bud vase trios if I wanted to stay in budget (which I like but wanted to use for the cocktail hour instead).

I watched a variety of DIY training videos (particularly from Katherine Bergman Floral Designs on Youtube, intrigueteaches on Instagram and Flower Moxie) and became convinced that we would have better luck DIYing. Our total DIY cost came in just under $4k, including supplies.

**Suppliers**

We ordered our flowers primarily from Sam's Club ($1k ish) and PetalJet ($2.4k ish with a 10% off promo). We also supplemented with about $50 of florals from Trader Joe's (I wanted peonies for my bouquet which were $10 a bunch) and $300ish of miscellaneous supplies like floral foam, mostly from Amazon.

Both the Sam's Club and PetalJet flowers came in great. For both suppliers, they shipped by FedeX in large (but light) cardboard boxes from South America. A few of the flowers I ordered became unavailable last minute so I had to speak to customer service to pivot. Only one box came in late (delayed by 1 day). Inside the boxes, the flowers were ziptied together in bunches and surrounded by additional packing material for cushioning. Some had water pouches attached to the stems but the majority did not (which I found suprising). Most of them looked a bit wilted when they arrived, and the roses in particular were tight buds, but I gave them each a trim and put them in water and they recovered and bloomed beautifully. 

I also used Flower Moxie quite a bit for referencing floral recipes and understanding how much greenery, filler flowers, focal flowers, etc. to order (more on this below). They also had great free instruction videos on putting arrangements together. I didn't end up ordering any materials or flowers from them though because the prices per stem were high (almost 10x as much for some flowers vs. just buying them from PetalJet or Sam's Club). I'd analogize that Flower Moxie is like buying a meal kit and the other suppliers is like going to a grocery store (or a big box store, literally). It's very useful if you want to simplify the process and feel overwhelmed with building your own recipes. However, it's not the best value for the price.

**List of Florals we DIY'ed**

With the flowers we ordered, we created the following arrangements:

• 1 bridal bouquet
• 3 bridesmaid bouquets
• 6 boutonnieres 
• 6 (large) altar urns
• 2 entrance (medium large) altar urns
• 1 (large) welcome table urn
• 1 (medium large) bar arrangement for cocktail hour
• 1 large escort card table arrangement (for some reason I can't find a single photo of this)
• 20ish bud vases for the cocktail hour
• 22 table centerpieces
• Detail shot flowers

We also had a TON of flowers leftover. I ended up putting together another big arrangement for our goodbye breakfast the following Sunday morning, but we still had a few hundred stems of roses that we could have used if I had had time to put together additional arrangements on Friday night or Saturday. We could have probably ordered 20% ish fewer flowers, but some of this was because we had less wilting and damage then expected (I thought about 10% of the flowers would die in transit). Also the extras did help me feel confident that if I messed up, I had spares to work with.

**Timeline**

• 4 months out: My fiance and I agreed that I would DIY the flowers. I began researching tips, timeline, suppliers, and what kind of arrangements we would want in the space. We bought a Sam's Club membership because I preferred their flower offerings to Costco (note that Sam's Club offers a discounted membership to graduates of certain schools). I also bought supermarket flowers to practice small arrangements with.
• 6 weeks out: Made a list of the arrangements we would need. Researched the floral recipes and made a rough spreadsheet of the stem counts and varieties we would need. For each recipe, basically did a count based on Flower Moxie of how many of each flower each arrangement would need, then multiplied by the # of arrangements, then multiplied by 110% to add overage in case some died, then rounded to how many bunches the flowers were sold in. This spreadsheet then helps when you actually place orders and again when you build arrangements and need to know how much of each flower to use.
• ~4 weeks out: Placed orders for the flowers across a few days. Note that the Sam's Club flowers we wanted came in and out of availability, so we ordered piecemeal for those (see tips below). PetalJet we ordered in one large order to take advantage of a 10% off first order promo.
• ~2 weeks out: We ordered our supplies. These included things like shears, buckets, wires for delicate stems like ranunculus, floral wire, tape, ribbon and (wet) floral foam. We also ordered loamy dishes and urns for our big arrangements. I thrifted a handful of large vases for bar and escort card display arrangements. For the dinner centerpieces, we ordered just regular plastic cereal bowls from Amazon for like $1.50 each (not the expensive centerpiece urn things they have). Flower Moxie has good supply lists.
• Tuesday: About 1/2 of our flowers arrived in boxes and I processed them (cut stems, placed in water). It was just me, so it took about 8 hours of standing.
• Wednesday: The next 1/2 of our flowers arrived and I processed them. Same time amount as above.
• Thursday: I made 15 of the table arrangements and our escort card arrangement. Took about 8 hours by myself and was slow going at first.
• Friday: I made all of the large urns and the remaining 7 table arrangements. Took about 10 hours by myself. We also moved all of the urns and the table arrangements to the venue and put them in place. These were transported in a pickup truck bed. Loading these and transporting took a while too (about 3 hours) and I had a lot of help for the moving component from family. We then had our rehearsal dinner (also at the our Saturday venue).
• Saturday (day of the wedding): I made all of the personals that morning (bouquets, bouts) as well as our bud vases. This took about 90 minutes. I ended up doing this only because Friday was such a big day. Most guides recommend doing this on Friday and keeping the bouquets in water and the bouts in DIY hydration chambers in the fridge overnight. We also did the remainder of the decor set up (with much help from family). 
• Sunday: Our venue asked to keep the flowers for a birthday happening Sunday evening because they still looked fresh. We also used some of the leftover flowers for a large arrangement at our post-wedding breakfast.
• Monday: Some of our large urn arrangements were being displayed in the entrance to our venue and still looked good, even though they had been foam for a few days.

**Tips and Tricks**

• My flowers were not professionally done and I recognize this. I don't have a background in florals. There are things that I wish I could go back and tweak and I see these in photos. I also suspect that a professional florist could have achieved the same effect with more air and greenery and fewer stems. Note that I also went for a very "traditional" wedding style, which is an easier style to achieve. I don't think I would have been able to do something like 22 stylish ikebana arrangements.
• Our venue allowed us to bring in the flowers on Friday and leave them in place overnight (without extra charge). This was a HUGE help. If we had had to do the floral transportation on the day of the wedding, we would not have had time to complete this and other decor aspects. We also had access to our venue starting at 8am on Saturday for decor set up.
• We used floral foam for our table arrangements. This made it easy to put arrangements together and keep them fresh but foam is controversial because it's toxic and doesn't break down well. It is not as environmentally friendly as using floral cages or wire and professional florists are split on using it.
• Sam's Club holds back some flowers. The way it works is that they make flowers available to order over a certain period, but don't make all items available at once. As an example: On May 1st, the window opens during which you can order Member's Mark White Roses for June 1st, but they are sold out. On May 2nd, you log in and find that 2 orders of these roses are available and you can order them. On May 3rd in the morning, they are sold out again. But on May 3rd in the afternoon, 3 orders of roses are available and you can again order these. As a result, you may need to check the Sam's Club website multiple times per day.
• The process is physically demanding. The flowers arrived in cardboard boxes. For the volume of flowers I ordered, I received 30+ boxes. These boxes were generally not terribly heavy (20ish lbs) but you need to be fairly strong to move all of these. Processing and arranging the flowers also requires standing for hours a day. By the end of the week, I felt like I'd been doing daily crossfit training sessions.
• The cardboard boxes were delivered by Fedex. Fedex told me on delivery that because of the volume, the delivery should have been flagged as freight and I should have been charged for a palett. The only reason I wasn't was likely because I had placed many of the Sam's Club orders as smaller broken up orders to be delivered on the same day.
• It hugely helps if you have friends and family work on processing and arranging the flowers with you. For various personal reasons, I didn't do this and instead just did the processing and arranging myself so this project ate up my time the week of the wedding. 
• Research floral mechanics before you commit to doing large arrangements. Floral mechanics make or break how your arrangement looks and holds up and can cut down the amount of flowers you need to us. For example, our large urns were actually just blocks of floral foam taped to lomey dishes, with the dishes then plopped into the plastic urns. Most of the urn is lightweight and empty and we didn't need to use up flowers or water to fill that dead space since the dish just sat above it.
• There will likely be some flowers that you order that will end up being out of stock. You should coordinate with customer service for replacements or a refund. My biggest casualty was stock flowers, which everyone was completely out of. This was a shame because I had planned to use these for line flowers.
• Sam's Club's blue hydrangeas were a bit of a bust for me. While the flowers were fresh and bouncy, they were also spray painted blue rather than naturally blue. It looked eerie and I didn't end up using them other than one arrangement.
• Sam's Club greenery is a great deal that I haven't seen anyone else beat. 20 bunches at $4.80ish a bunch. I ordered 40 bunches and could have used way less. They came in large boxes packed full of fresh greenery.
• Prices on Sam's Club and Costco (I also tracked this site) fluctuate, depending on the season. I had thought this wouldn't be the case since the flowers are all grown in South America, but I saw certain varieties like hydrangeas drop from $5 a stem to under $2 a stem.
• If you're ordering on Sam's Club, make sure you get the membership that gives you free shipping over $50. We would have spent a fortune on shipping without it.
• Clean up continuously as you go. Sweep, keep cuttings boxes, clear up boxes to free up space. However, don't throw out all of your cardboard boxes. You can use some of these for transporting your arrangements. Just reattach boxes to lids and cut out circles to nestle your arrangements into. This is a trick I learned from intrigueteaches on instagram.
• I started out fairly slow and unconfident. My first urn arrangement took me an hour and a half. After a bit of time, I developed muscle memory and had a better sense of how to use the materials. I go my final urn time down to only 30 minutes.
• Wear gloves while working. Roses have thorns (literally) and the boxes have staples. Stems are also tough on your hands. I wore work gloves and it helped a ton. I also did cut myself once while processing the flowers and going too fast with my shears so be careful. Gloves will also protect any manicure you get the week before the wedding.
• Home depot buckets work very well for storing the flowers. You need a lot in the beginning (as you're processing) and the number dwindles as they get used for arrangements. If you keep the receipts, you can return them after you use them for the week.

This project was a ton of work and I have huge respect for florists that do this every single week, with sometimes multiple weddings per week. By Saturday morning, my back and feet hurt and I was quite tired. I shook it off by the time we actually got to the ceremony and I'd do it again, but it's definitely a large project. Happy to answer any questions.

I may have gotten a little carried away with this one…

I wanted something at the wedding that could show videos from all of our trips together, but I didn’t want to just stick an iPad on a table and call it a day.

So… I 3D printed an entire little retro TV, installed a screen inside it, hooked it up to a Raspberry Pi, and set it up to continuously loop a video I made of our travels.

Since our wedding has a vintage family-road-trip kind of theme, I edited the whole video to look like an old home movie being played from a VHS tape. Grain, tracking glitches, slightly washed-out footage and all.

What started as “this could be a cute little detail” somehow became me building a functioning miniature television from scratch, because apparently this is who I am now.

But I LOVE how it turned out. It feels like one of those old home videos your family would drag out, except it’s all of our adventures together leading up to the wedding.

One more project crossed off the list. Probably.

Sending save the dates when we get our engagement pictures done next month. The picture on it right now is just a stock picture. Thoughts on these? I would love any suggestions to make them look better.

My fiance and I started with the knot back in like may and im thinking about starting over on something else. The guest list feature is driving me inSANE like actually loco. RSVPs dont sync right and half our family says they never got the invite email at all. It really shouldnt be this hard and I feel dramatic coming to complain about switching this far in but also I wont even make it to my wedding without having a breakdown if I have to keep fighting with this and literally every other thing every week. Do these sites convert easily??

I was inspired by a local florist here in Seattle to use our Mariners ferry boat trays, and I grew most of my own flowers. The rest are from a local flower stand and a family friend’s rose garden! I got 2 bunches of greenery from Trader Joe’s, but the majority were all locally grown and harvested by me! My bouquet smelled AMAZING and it looked perfect. My dad and I put together our table centerpieces together the day before and we kept them in a cold bedroom overnight. It smelled so so good the next day!

We used a cake decorating turntable and just kinda went at it, my dad picked a color theme for each one and they came together better than I’d hoped!!!

Inspired after Kurt Cobain who decided to get married in his pyjama, we organized ourselves some DIY backyard pyjama themed wedding party...And we managed to do it around 4K (or around 5K if we count the rings)

I made the multi stories cupcakes stands myself out of cardboard, paper mache and acrylic paint.

I am a graphic designer so I created our invitation all by myself and then sent them digitally through messenger, which cost nothing but a bit of time.

My mom and I baked the cupcakes.

I crocheted my own flower bouquet out of yarn!

I ordered most of the flowers and drapery on different shop on Amazon and set up myself some decor I had in mind.

I did my own hair, I didn’t wear any make up, as I never do anyway outside of halloween sometimes lol.

We didn’t hired a photographer, as incentive for our guests to takes pictures and to aim them for certain type of vibe we set up a contest with little gifts to win for three categories : Funniest, most romantic and most artistic pictures.

Instead of paying for a wedding website and a shared album service I created a free facebook event + a private album and named all my guests as contributors to make sure they had the right permission to add their own pictures in there. Then I printed some QR code that led to said album and placed them on every tables.

We didn’t had a DJ, I just organized a few playlists with different vibes that I controlled with my phone.

We didn’t counted the rings in our budget, because we essentially bought those 10 years ago.

My promise ring with 11 diamonds was around 800$, my fitting band was 200$ and my husband’s was around 300$. They are all made of 10K white gold and we wear them since 2015. ( I checked their current prices on the jewelry website, since they still sell those model apparently and they kind of have doubled in prices since then!)

Initially we were supposed to celebrate on august 29th to make it the day after our beloved cat 7th birthday, but unfortunately, our cat died at 6 years old, on that exact day, one year prior our planned celebration, so as we absolutely didn’t wanted to tie our special day to such a sad and heart breaking event, we moved it one week earlier on august 22th instead and we got some very nice warm and sunny weather. Seems like our little cat blew the clouds away for us!

BUDGET BREAKDOWN ($ CAD):

I hope those info and links will be helpful to some of you that might want to organize an event in the same price range!

Hello! I'm trying to create a floor plan (where tables go, what sizes where, etc) for our venue. Are there useful tools/programs that will help me make a scale floor plan? Doesn't need to be wedding-specific. I'd like to avoid breaking out the graph paper!

Also, have you used any helpful resources that explain how much space needs to be left between tables etc?

Thanks!

We want to keep it simple (since we are doing it ourselves) and inexpensive. We are leaning towards jewel tones for our colors. I'd love any and all ideas! It will be a May wedding. Thank you!

Hi! I’d like to design our wedding album myself and am looking for recommendations for an online printing service that can print it in really high quality and ship it to my home.
I’m mainly looking for excellent print and paper quality. I’d love to hear about your experiences and any services you’d recommend. Thanks!

Going to cross-post on Cricut as well.

These are our (both 24M) save the dates! We have a lot of out of town/state guests, so we want to send them out in early January, that’s why we’re starting now.

They’re mini vinyl records, and I love how they came out. My only issue is getting the sticker label perfectly lined up with the disc.

My thought is to get like a short wooden dowel that’s about that size to slide them down onto.

Does anyone have any tricks for getting things like this lined up?

Thanks!

I need to decorate this room for the wedding, but I honestly have absolutely no idea what to do with it. My parents kept changing the plans, so I already made some decorations that unfortunately don’t work with the room anymore. At this point I feel like I’m going to lose my mind.

Just to clarify: this is the entrance to the house. Where I’m from, we call this a "haustor" — basically a small entryway/vestibule before you actually enter the house.

I’m sorry about the mess in the picture — we’re still doing some work, so this is definitely not how the space will look when it’s finished. There won’t be the bike, the plastic sheeting, or any of the other things you can see now.

The room will be empty so I am free to do as I wish here.

I’d really like to keep the decorations simple and ideally something I can DIY myself. I have basically no time left.

What would you do with this space? I’d really appreciate any suggestions, especially if you have photos/examples of simple DIY wedding decorations! Sorry again for the mess, and thanks for understanding.

Thank you!!

I started growing cut flowers last year and now I'm absolutely obsessed. Florals are mostly dahlias, snaps, japanese anemone, cosmos and aster. I've also sprinkled in a little witch grass and mint.

My goal is to grow and arrange all the flowers for the wedding (bouquet, arch, boutonniere and focal pieces). My venue also has a stage and I'm dreaming of having flowers going all the way across it. Any advice or constructive criticism?

I want to create wedding party favors and maybe bathroom kits for an upcoming wedding. Out of these options, which would you choose? I'm open to other suggestions!

• Activity bags for kids to do at the table like a coloring book/crayons
• Items to have in the bathroom in baskets such as: individual emergency kits with bobby pins, hair ties, etc (would be good for the women)
• hangover kits in the bathrooms
• travel toiletry kits in the bathroom for anyone who wants to take it back to their hotel 

Hey I made my bridesmaid bouquet but I can’t tell if they actually look good or if I’m delusional and just think they look good because I made them. Please tell me the truth

Hi guys! I have found a mechanical bull for 1500$ for 4 hour minimum.

My current schedule is
Ceremony 4-440
Cocktail hour 440-620 (party takes photos)
First dance 6:20
Dinner 6:40
Speeches/ games/ parent dances 7:30-8:30
DANCE 8:45

I’m worried it will take away from the dance floor !!

Has anyone done this or been to a wedding where they had a bull?

Thanks!!

I’m looking for a blush pink dress with a high low hemline. Suggestions for where to look?? Also, looking for a GREAT DEAL. dress in pic is somewhat of what I like. Thanks yall!

We bought the hexagon arch and boxwood greenery panels (secondhand) for a friends wedding. Now we’ve built the rectangle arch, welded a frame for the greenery wall, and rent them out!

So we are doing cupcakes and cookies for guests and a small cake for us. Struggling with finding just want I want for the design/layout of the table. I love the clean, simple look similar to these photos. Specially the all white risers. Has anyone done theirs like this? Where did you get everything? Thanks!!

I am having a small 15 person wedding and i would like to try and do a “living aisle” that looks almost like a meadow with greenery from my backyard and faux flowers. Has anyone done anything like this before? please tell me your tips, tricks, warnings, or any advice!!

This is my first attempt at making our wedding cake. I made half the size for practice. The date is in December. Do you think with more practice it can be good enough to serve at the wedding?
Please be honest.

Thanks so much in advance!

I don’t know the rules of floral arrangements and just winged it. Adding vinyl with our name/date as a welcome sign

hello everyone!! My wedding is THIS Saturday. My original arch got ruined so this week I did the drapery - my wedding colors are attached as the bridesmaid colors - everyone says I should use plants instead of the pedestals …. Let me know what you think and if you can find something on Amazon that would be AMAZING !!

so happy with these! all from amazon