By Wendy Mihm | March 10, 2011

Do it yourself or “DIY” bouquets are a fantastic way to save money on a wedding, and to add a touch of the bride and groom’s personality in the process.  When the bride and her team decide to go with DIY bouquets, they have complete hands-on involvement in the types of flowers to be used in the bride’s and bridesmaids’ bouquets.  Plus, they eliminate the floral designer’s markup, which is often more than 100% of the cost of the actual flowers and supplies.

With a little planning, some teamwork and some design guidance, anyone can make a beautiful wedding bouquet.  No, seriously.

Steps to Make DIY Bouquets

• Research (online) and select one or two types of flowers with hearty stems. You will often find many higher-end floral designers sticking with a monochromatic scheme or a play on that theme, with several hues of the same basic color.  Often times, mixing a bunch of colors or different types of flowers of different lengths can quickly create a messy look.  One exception to this rule is the country garden look, but you should tread with caution here.  Avoid flowers with woody stems, as these are hard to work with.  Also avoid flowers with flimsy stems that quickly turn into pulp.  If you are unsure of the heartiness of the stem, ask the flower merchant before you buy.

Shopping at the Wholesale Flower Market

• Gather a few cement buckets (or other buckets with deep wells) and go to the wholesale flower market in your area (Google it—they are usually in downtown, low-rent areas) a day or two (at most) before the wedding. You will get the best prices there.  If you can’t find cement buckets, look for some when you get to the flower market. They will be all over the place.

• When you arrive at the flower market, get a flat cart.

• Go around with your cart and buy enough of the flowers you selected, so that each bridesmaid gets a nice, big bunch, then buy an additional ~10% or so, to allow for error. You should be able to eyeball it simply by gathering the flowers in your own hands. Put the flowers in the cement buckets on your cart.

• Then buy a big handful of flowers for the bride + ~10%. Her bouquet will probably be white or shades of cream, but many brides are opting to buck tradition and go for their own pop of color.

• Now find a vendor that sells floral supplies.  Buy thick, satin-y ribbon in a coordinating wedding color, pearl-tipped corsage pins, and green, waxed floral tape if they have it.  If they don’t have the floral tape, ask if you can have as many thick rubber bands as you have bouquets, x2.  If they don’t have the rubber bands, you’ll have to drum them up from Office Depot or somewhere else. 

Prepping the Flowers for your DIY Bouquet

• When you get home, put water in the cement buckets and store the flowers in a cool place until you’re ready to assemble the bouquets (Ideally the evening before or even morning of the wedding).

• Then, when you’re ready to assemble your first DIY bouquet, pull off the exess foliage (which will be almost all of it) and rotted or wilting petals.  Shear off any thorns or unwanted branches with a stem cutter or very sharp knife.  Then trim off the last two inches of the stems and put the flowers back in some fresh water for a minute or two to freshen them up.  This is not their final cut, however—you will keep the stems long until the bouquet is bound.

Assembling the DIY Bouquets

• Now let’s assemble the bouquet.  First, we start by creating a focal point in the middle.  Choose 4 really beautiful flowers and arrange them in a square pattern.  Make sure they are all rising up to the same height. This will become the center of the bouquet – the focal point – the rest of the bouquet will slope gently down and out from this point, sort of like a mushroom shape.

• Take the rest of the flowers, one by one, and arrange them around your focal point, sloping gently downward like the top of a mushroom.  Do this, keeping the flowers firmly in your hand, until you are happy with the size and shape of your bouquet.

• To secure the bouquet in place, wrap the green floral tape (or rubber band) at the top of the bouquet.  Make sure you don’t wrap so high that it appears you are choking the flowers, or so low that the bouquet falls apart or becomes loose.  You will see a place where the stems seem to gently flow together and where the top of your hand rests when you assembled the bouquet.  This is where to wrap.  A good estimate might be 4” from the base of the flower heads.  Then wrap again in the middle of the stems.

Now you should have a pretty good idea of what your bouquet is going to look like.  If you are not happy with the shape, now is the time to make minor adjustments.

• Ok, time to move to the final stage!  Hold the stems under cool running water and trim the ends on an angle to a length of about 8 inches or whatever length you would like your final DIY bouquet to be.  All stems should now be neatly trimmed to the same length.

• Measure a piece of ribbon that is about 2.5x the length of the stems of your bouquet.  Trim the ends on a diagonal.

• Fasten the ribbon to the bouquet with a corsage pin.  Wrap the ribbon tightly around the stems one time, so that it overlaps the first layer halfway. Push another pin through. Repeat with tightly wound satiny ribbon and pearlized pins, all the way down the bouquet.  This will give the effect of the bouquet wearing buttons down its side.

• Another way to do this is to tuck the ribbon inside the bouquet or secure it with one pin.  Then simply spiral it down and back up the length of the stems and secure it with a couple of pins.  Either way can look elegant – it’s up to you.

Once the bouquets are constructed, they should be placed back in buckets and stored in a cool place, and the flowers should be misted, if possible.  Also, if you are working with roses and some of the rose heads are partially closed, you can simply blow them open.

The first one may feel a bit tricky, but once you get the hang of it, anyone can make a DIY bouquet, really.  So grab your fellow bridesmaids, a few big, ugly cement buckets, and take a trip on down to the flower market.  You might discover a talent you never knew you had!

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By Wendy Mihm | Thursday January 13, 2011

According to a recent survey conducted by wedding website guru theknot.com, the cost of the average American wedding is currently hovering around $27,800. That’s almost twenty eight thousand dollars, people!  You could buy a really nice BMW or other such fancy car for that kind of cash, people!  Yet, rather than finding ways to save money on their wedding, couples all across the country allow their wedding spending to snowball out of control into a pile of debt this large, or larger!

We at FinancialRx are not advocating for you to scrimp to the point of having a bland wedding with four guests and a pot of beans and franks served in paper bowls.  (Or is it franks and beans?  I can never remember.  Anyway.)  What we’re talking about is to actively save money by being creative and applying little style to every decision you make about your wedding. 

To do this, you must put some thought into who you are as a couple and what you want your wedding to be about.  Think in terms of theme, tone, look and feel of the day and/or night.  What do you want it to feel like for your guests to be there?  What colors? What smells? What feelings to you want to evoke for your guests, your spouse-to-be, you?  Then decide what you really need to accomplish this, and—just as importantly—what you don’t need.  For example, do you really need match books and little napkins with your names on them?  But I digress, so let me get back off my soap box…

Ok, now, once you come up with the look, feel and tone of your wedding, you will have a better idea of your overall color scheme and a sense of the flavors of your food and drinks.  This is where our idea comes in:  how to save money with a signature wedding drink.

First let’s do the math on how much money you can save with a signature drink versus an open bar.  According to a site called Costhelper.com, serving an open bar will typically cost an average of $52.50 per guest (taken from their range of $15 - $90).  So if you have 170 guests, an open bar would cost you roughly $8,925.  Now, if you limited your bar selection to non-alcoholic drinks and one “signature drink” that fit into the overall feel of your wedding, you might reasonably expect to reduce the cost of the bar to about $30 per guest.  This is because you no longer must stock every type of alcohol, just the one or two types necessary to make your signature drink, plus the non-alcoholic drinks like sodas and waters.  Now your total bar tab looks more like $5,100.  Still expensive, but not quite as crazy.

Plus the look and feel of your wedding is supported by festive and fun drinks that reflect your special day.  You can even dial up the fun factor by giving your signature drink a wedding-themed name.  My husband and I were married in a villa in Mexico called Casa Cosmos, so we took the easy way out and named our signature wedding drink the Casa Cosmopolitan. I know, duh, right?  But they were really, really good.

Cheers!

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By Wendy Mihm | Wednesday November 10, 2010

If you are planning a wedding, then you already know that it can quickly become an expensive affair.  And if your heart is set on a destination wedding, that presents a whole separate set of budgetary challenges.

To keep your wedding on a budget, some who dole out financial advice will recommend that you get married during off-peak season.  It sounds logical, but for warm weather destinations like Hawaii, Mexico or the Florida Keys that can translate into incredibly hot, sticky weather, tropical rainstorms, or even bug swarms in some areas!  If you’re planning a ski destination, this can result in too many muddy boots and too few double black diamonds. Probably not what you’re dreaming of.

What you may not have heard of that can save you money is the often overlooked and frequently negotiable “almost-off-peak,” or “shoulder season.”  The shoulder season is the time that is right between the “peak” and the “off-peak” season.  You will not see it advertised, because it does not formally exist. 

For example, let’s say you want to have your destination wedding in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico. During your research, you notice that many of the resorts in Puerto Vallarta list their peak season ending on or around April 30th and off-peak season starting on or around May 1st.  What you can read into this as a wallet wise wedding planner, is that late April and early May could be considered “shoulder season” in Puerto Vallarta.

So what?

So this means that you if you plan your wedding events for this time frame, you may be able to negotiate off-peak rates and still benefit from peak weather.  Since it is a destination wedding and your guests will be traveling from afar, you’ll likely all be staying awhile once you arrive.  To take advantage of this, you may want to plan multiple get-togethers to maximize your enjoyment of each other’s company.  Then you can have your pre-wedding events, such as a rehearsal dinner or other gathering during peak season (late April) and the wedding and post events, like a brunch, during off-peak season (early May), all at off-peak rates.  If you plan early enough, you may even be able to push everything into the late weeks of the peak season and still negotiate off-peak rates if business has been slow in the area.

Again, this is not an advertised phenomenon and you certainly will not be extended off-peak rates for peak season unless you ask.  But remember, in this down economy, it is a buyer’s market, so it always pays to ask.

Happy planning, you wallet wise wedding planner!

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