Silk Flowers

If I never see another one again, it will be too soon.

I am currently in the process of cutting the heads off of the thousands of flowers I purchased from http://www.silkflowersfactory.com/.  I'm almost done but my fingers hurt so I am going to try to finish the rest tomorrow and then start making poms again.

Oh, the joys of DIY!

More flowers = more poms

So yesterday I got about $400 worth of silk flowers in the mail.  The next few days will consist of removing the flower heads and then working on more poms.  I have LOTS of styrofoam balls coming in the mail as well so that will give me plenty more work to do.  I'll post pictures of my progress.

First Pomander Completed

So I finished my first pomander.  I got the mini carnations from silkflowersfactory.com and the styrofoam ball from Michaels (with a 40% off coupon of course).  I wanted to try it out and see how they came out so I only bought one.  It was super easy to make and didn't take a long time at all.  I plan on making about 10 of them to hang outside during the ceremony.  I'm also thinking of using them as centerpieces.  It would be a lot easier since it's not using real flowers and I can do them far ahead of time.

The picture I took is the pomander sitting on top of a vase.  I figure I could fill the vase with pebbles or sand/seashells (since we live in Florida) and just sit the pomander on top.  I love the dark purple and I also ordered white and what was SUPPOSED to be lavendar but is more like a pink/purple.  I'm curious to see how the white come out.  I ordered 12 styrofoam balls on ebay for $32. The flowers cost $25 for 250 flower heads.  I used about 1/2 of them.  Ribbon I got at the dollar store and I can use one spool for about 3 poms.  So basically the cost for one pomander is $16.  Not too shabby.  Those would be some cheap centerpieces too.  The florist was quoting me like $50 a centerpiece and I just don't have that in my budget so this would definitely work better.

Pomander Flowers are ordered!

So I ordered the silk carnations for my pomanders today at http://www.silkflowersfactory.com/.  I got dark purple, lavendar, and cream ones.  I still need to buy styrofoam balls and ribbon.  The Walmart near our new apartment has an AMAZING craft section so I will probably get the styrofoam balls there.  The ribbon I can get at Dollar Tree.  I plan on using the following tutorial from littlenikki on Wedding Bee (my favorite wedding site).  You can see the tutorial here:  http://diy.weddingbee.com/topic/silk-flower-pomanders-1.  I also found shepherd hooks at Dollar Tree so if I can't tie them to chairs, I can hang them from those.  I am hoping it looks something like this:

Driving me crazy

Casey (my fiance) is driving me crazy!  I have all of these great ideas for the wedding and he has no faith that I can pull any of them off.  I told him I am DIYing the flowers and he just went on a speech about how I'll never do it.  He also hates my pomander idea for the ceremony decorations.  I'm doing it anyway though.  There needs to be something on the outside to decorate the venue.  The problem is that Casey thinks he knows EVERYTHING about weddings since he's DJed so many of them.  Ugh.  Well it's my money that is paying for the wedding so we will spend it how I want to spend it.

One of the girls on Wedding Bees (my FAVORITE wedding website) had a great tutorial on how to make them.  They came out lovely so I think I am going to order the flowers from the same site she did.  Here is a look at the tutorial.

Moving time & Flower Ideas

So we're moving next week into a bigger and cheaper apartment (see, I am good at making deals in ALL aspects of life) and it's amazing to see how much CRAP we have accumulated.  I'm glad that we will have more storage space in this new place though.  So I haven't been able to do much when it comes to the wedding front. 

I'm still looking for ideas on flowers.  I'm going up to NY in December to do a lot of wedding stuff so I am going to go to a few places for floral consultations.  My future father-in-law suggested Stew Leonards so I am going to try there.  He is a DJ in the Connecticut area so he knows all of the best vendors.  I'm still not sure if I should attempt a DIY for the centerpieces and possibly even the bouquets.  I hate spending so much money on something I KNOW I can do on my own but I don't know if I am going to have the space at my parent's house to keep everything refrigerated properly.  Also, I am not sure when or how I am going to be able to get them to the venue on the day of the wedding.  I thought about doing silk flowers, but I'm not sure if that would be tacky or expensive.  I would have to get nice ones that look real and aren't too much money.

I'm also thinking of doing wedding pomanders (also known as "kissing balls") for the ceremony.  I could attach them to the chairs for a little bit of decoration or I could see if the Candlewood has shepherd's hooks to hang them on.  I would do those with silk flowers so I could get them done ahead of time.  Probably in some combination of purple, yellow, and white.