Starting off the wedding weekend...

So this is the weekend of Lisa's wedding.  She's my youngest sister (21) and is marrying Jon.  They are adorable together and very much in love.  So it will be a fun but busy weekend for our family.

Friday was the day that my talents were challenged. :)  For my own wedding, we did our own flowers (purchased from FreshRoses and arranged ourselves).  Then we did that for Sarah and Leonard's wedding.  And now we did it for Lisa's wedding too.  I'm afraid this may be the last time I'll get to use this fun resource, now that Megan has decided on a real florist for her wedding, and who knows what Matthew will do when it comes time.  But oh, is it ever fun!

The initial fun is to get all of these freshly shipped roses into water as soon as possible, and cut them ends so they can get as much water as possible.  This is fun because you can see the roses opening in front of your very eyes once they start to get water!  It easier to separate out the flowers for their various purposes once they are in buckets this way, too.

The biggest challenge is boutineers and corsages, but they turned out great.  Tiny imperfections won't show from faraway anyhow, and they really do look good.  We did white and yellow roses for some, and just yellow for othes.  The boys had a filler of solidaster (which actually was more pointy clumps than the picture shows), and the corsages had little bunches of baby's breathe.

Then we did bouquets, just grouping gold flowers with baby's breathe for Lisa's, and yellow and white flowers with baby's breathe for the bridesmaids.  We decided not to tie the ribbons on until Sunday, and so I've been sitting here doing a little research on the internet for how we want to do that (probably like this for at least Lisa's, she wants ribbon all the way covering).

After that came the vases for the front of the church and the reception room.  Wow, they turned out SO good, I'm so happy with the results.  White and yellow roses with baby's breathe in TALL vases.  Lisa got these pretty stones to put in the bottom of the vase, and they shimmer so pretty.  Then shorter vases with Alstromeria and the solidaster.  This worked out perfectly, and the alstro isn't even opened yet.  We were very pleased!

Next step in the wedding weekend is tonight, when we have the rehearsal dinner.  We'll get there early and start setting stuff up mid-afternoon.  (I know the church's set up well because it's where my wedding was, too :) )  I think I'll get a few more corsage pins before that, because now that I see the ideas on hand-tying the ribbon and attaching it with shorter pins, I think I want to try that.  And I'm going to take a nap.  For whatever reason I woke up at 6:45 and looked at the clock and started thinking about ribbons so I had to get up.  And that's the story so far, quite exciting stuff!