Vendor Meetings (Post 5 - Florists)

Here I am - finally - with my last vendor post. As I alluded to in my long list in the last entry, there are still many posts to come, but this is the final installment in the official "planning" part of the process. Of course we've done a lot of planning since way back in winter when we had all these meetings, but the vendors comprise the "big" stuff (and let me tell you how good it felt to cross those "big" things off the list!).

Just like with the DJ's, we ended up meeting with only 2 florists: TLB and CLF. TLB had come highly recommended from some friends of ours who were married several years ago and CLF had very professional communications including a really helpful survey that helped me sort of take stock of the whole floral process. I have a confession: I'm not really into flowers. I mean, I think they're pretty and everything, but since we have very munchy cats, I don't ever really have them around. I don't know much beyond "Hey, that's a rose!" or "Hey, that's a sunflower!", so the whole wedding flower process was daunting to me.

Thankfully, I had seen pictures of bouquets online that I liked and even put together a sort of pretentious little lookbook (can you call something a "book" if it's only 3 pages) to take with us to the meetings. I may or may not have insisted that this document be printed on excessively costly glossy stock and it may or may not have been adorned with the title "Floral Inspirations" in a really prissy downloaded font. Just to be clear, I'm not claiming I don't have issues. (Clearly.)

Our meeting at TLB went well. They had some really cool resources like books full of pictures of flowers and what season they are blooming and tons and tons of rentable materials. They had branches, vases, wood pieces for centerpieces, and even shepherd's hooks for our outdoor ceremony. In this process I realized that what professional florists really offer is expertise and those staging-style props. Honestly, it's not much different from the caterers in that way. As we were talking to the florist, though, I started to realize how much this was all going to cost. And we had been to several meetings in the past few weeks that had included price tags in the thousands... I was having a hard time imagining another big bill. Between the centerpieces on the individual tables, a different one for the head table, some sort of decorations for the outdoor ceremony, and then bouquets and boutonnieres... That's a lot of dead little plant sex organs. (I hate to be so brash here, but really... that's what flowers are. It's a lot more creepy, though, when you think of it that way...)

Our second meeting made me feel more of the same. I really enjoyed meeting with the floral designer and I loved looking around their office. While TLB's office was a table in the front of their store front (which was sort of a large workspace with checkout counter with much of their stock visible), CLF's office was very small and quaint and FULL of ribbon. There were at least three or four ribbon caddies on the walls... so fun! At this meeting, I actually realized how much of a taste I'd acquired about flowers in such a short amount of time. I had researched the names of flowers, their seasonality (though I'm not sure that's a word), and I'd realized things like the fact that I wanted a more non-traditional, organic sort of bouquet. It's funny how looking at hundreds of pictures on the internet helps you to a) lose your mind so that you end up printing out these goofy little sheets for your vendors and b) refine ideas you didn't even know you had. After all the cool idea-sharing and pie-in-the-sky idea throwing arounding, it didn't take me long (most likely between the office and the car) to start guessing about how much these proposals were going to cost.

When both proposals came in at around 2,000 dollars, I wasn't surprised. Both florists assured us that we could take things down a notch if we needed/wanted to for cost reasons, but I was already thinking about alternatives. I mean, let's be honest: I'm not going to cook food for 100 people while getting my hair and makeup done on the big day. Likewise, I'm not going to be sticking dowel rods into layers of cake while my photographer snaps away. These undertakings are too big and too difficult to do myself. There are, the internet assures me, people who do... but I am not them. I know myself and what I can take. But what I started to realize is that who I am and what I can take definitely includes doing the flowers myself.

I know... I know... it's still a lot and it's still going to happen awfully close to the wedding and I have already fully admitted my novice-level skills on this one, but... it's a much more common diy project than any other, and the internet has bolstered my confidence (for good or ill). The biggest roadblock I've come across is that ordering flowers pretty much needs to happen in bulk and that means that you get a lot less variety. So, I've researched and researched and I'm still figuring out where exactly I want to spend my flower $$, but I'm excited about making this happen.

I guess we'll see when the big day comes how realistic this cost-saving measure was. I'm hoping to be able to do the flowers for under 500 dollars, but we'll have to see how that works out. I've selected an online flower wholesaler and I think we'll probably augment our flower selections with some local flowers - perhaps from Jungle Jims, Bigg's, or Trader Joe's? That way we can have a little variety in amongst all the oft-repeated bulk-purchased flowers. For awhile I was really anxious about this whole plan and there were plenty of people who tried to warn me away from it, but again... we'll just have to wait and see how it turns out. Sort of fun/suspenseful in a way (though I doubt I'll feel that calm about it when I'm stripping stems and wrestling with floral tape the day before my wedding!)