Flowers and whatnot

A widely known fact about me is that my retail jobs from high school were centered around plants and flowers.  I started out at Frank’s Nursery and Crafts. They weren’t so crafty when I started working there (except for ribbons/flower related crafts), and by the time they went out of business they had changed their name to just Frank’s Nursery.  The skill I learned there that will contribute to wedding decorations was how to make ribbon bows: 


Ugh, not in red though!

My other job was at Giant (the grocery store) in the flower shop. Despite what some people think (*cough*Mike*cough*), the Giant flower shop is a full service flower shop. They can do anything a regular flower shop can do, and that includes wedding flowers!  I learned all kinds of things there. How to make arrangements with those green spongy things, how to make vase arrangements, how to make boutonnieres, corsages, bouquets.  The florist would give me free reign when it came to gift baskets (she LOVED my study gift basket that included snacks and energy drinks). It’s my favorite non-career job that I’ve had, and it even beats out some of the career jobs!

The skills I learned there I will DEFINITELY use. I’m slightly rusty, but that’s what the cheap $5 bunches of flowers are for. Pick one up here and there and make an arrangement! Practice makes perfect. And we’ll save money if all we’re doing is buying flowers, and not hiring a florist to do the labor.

Since we have over a year until our wedding, we will get to see the flowers that will be in bloom around our wedding date.  They might not be exactly the same depending on the weather, but it’ll give us a good idea on which ones we might want.
But I don’t just want fresh flowers. I mean, I love them, and they can smell nice, but they all die and get crinkly!

As a girl who loves to get crafty, I was stoked to find a whole bunch of instructions for DIY fabric and paper flowers.  OK, so that might sound tacky. But check out these coffee filter flowers!



No tack here!

And these are some fabric flowers I made recently:

I think I should have used a smaller button so the 'petals' would pop, but still cute!



I LOVE this fabric brooch!

For now I’m just using scraps I already have around the house, because they’re free!  The yellow and black one doesn’t fit with my color scheme at all, but the green one does. (Friday's post will be about our colors).

I’m so excited to make more of these flowers, and to find many other tutorials to try!  If anyone out there wants to help me out, we can have flower making parties! Just let me know :)