Flower Arranging

I decided to take care of flowers an my own for the wedding originally with great enthusiasm, but more recently it has felt daunting.  As a first step to that, Viv, Hoyt and I made a trip to SF Flower Mart this weekend to see if we can find all the flowers I want to use, check out prices, and get some for a trial run.

It was a wonderous place!  So many flowers, so fragrant, and so overwhelming.  I didn't find garden roses, which is unfortunate but I did pick up some peonies, dahlias, and hydrangeas. 

 Hoyt is holding the flowers, feeling like he just won a beauty pageant.  Isn't he lovely?

Here are $40 of flowers.

I started off by trying a technique I saw on a tutorial, by making a grid over the flower box with tape.  (I'm supposed to use florist tape, which I didn't have, so this is just good ole scotch tape.)

Then I started inserting in the white hydrangeas, since they take up the most space.

Then I added in some dahlias.

And I kept going with the peonies, and the green hydrangeas, adjusting as necessary until I got the coverage I wanted.

That wasn't so bad.  I repeated the process with the smaller flower box.  And even after that, I had a bunch more flowers left over so I went to work filling a vase, a watering can, and these lovely juice jugs we recently got from World Market.

Here are all the arrangements I ended up with.

 And here's what $40 of flowers from the flower mart looks like after some work :)

Surprisingly, I really love the two simple arrangements in the juice jugs.  I might reshape my vision for the centerpieces to make use of them some more.  The girly part of me comes out around flowers.  This sure was a nice little one day project.  We'll see how things go when we have to do this for an entire wedding.