As you ladies already know, Travis and I had a DIY-heavy wedding.  One of the biggest projects that we took on was doing our own flowers.

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Let me be clear… my mom is amazing at flower arranging.  I am okay at best.  Travis was working on other things that day.  So when I say “we” did our own flowers, I mean my mom did our flowers and I helped.  Which brings me to tip #1 of DIY flower arranging:

1) Find someone who feels confident arranging flowers. The process will be way more stressful if you don’t have some sort of knack for putting a bouquet together.  And I promise, it is stressful enough without that hurdle.

2) Work as a team. Here’s how we built the bouquets: my mom stood in front of me and placed flowers into my hand so she could see what the bouquet would look like as I walked down the aisle.  When she was done, I handed the flowers to her or stood in a mirror so I could check and make adjustments.

3) Keep it simple. If you look at the photo of my bouquet above, you’ll notice that we didn’t use a bunch of different flowers.  In fact, we only used 2 types of flowers and 2 types of greenery.  I’d recommend leaving anything much more complicated than this to the pros.  (It’s hard to create balance with tons of different flowers unless you want a rougher, just-picked-from-a-meadow feel to your bouquet.  In that case, use as many flowers as you want!)

4) Wrap it up tight! Wrapping the bouquet is also a two person job.  Start with floral tape and finish it off with ribbon or fabric.  One person should hold the stems tight and the other should wrap them, slowly and evenly.  My mom was the wrapper and I was the holder.  To make it easier, I slowly rotated the stems so that she didn’t have to navigate around my fingers.

Would you (or did you) do your own flowers for your wedding?  Are you crafty at floral arranging?  Or would you leave a task like this to the pros?  Share your thoughts in the comments!