Wedding Details - Flowers

Oh, flowers. So important to a wedding. They dictate the feel of the wedding, the colour scheme, the smells... I am really looking forward to getting down our thinking process with the flowers. And by "our" I of course mean Mareike and my thinking process. I really don't think that the Hons had much to say about flowers.



My wonderful mother-in-law helping with the flowers



If you look back through the blog, you can see some of the thoughts we had. Mareike did a great summary of all the different bouquets out there and I talked about my love for peonies. Since I was a kid, I had been thinking of what flowers I would want at my wedding and it took me quite a while to decide what I wanted. What made it particularly tough - I am quite partial to spring flowers. Not awesome when you are getting married in September. So, without further ado - here is the story of our wedding flowers. And now "our" is Patrick and I.





Just before I had my only wedding breakdown



The thought process:

I was determined to not spend loads on my flowers, which automatically meant taking what was in season at the time. Therefore: no peonies, no anemones. I also fell in love with a bouquet shape more down the lines of a fresh picked wild flower bouquet and less "clean lined". It was important for us that people felt at home at our wedding and really comfortable so we wanted the flowers to be as natural and unaffected as possible. To save money (and cause I think it is really beautiful) we collected 100 glass jars and used them as vases.

The jars were wrapped in lace, kept in place with double-sided tape

The Florist:



My mom and dad are kinda friends with a florist in Cologne. That's 300km away from Bremen. In a fit of soft wedding brain I decided that it would be a great idea to get our flowers from her. Not only was she going to give us a great price, but it would be good for the relationships and we were sure she would do a great job. We met with her, decided that the easiest thing would be if she gave us bunches of flowers and we put them into the glassses ourselves. She knew I wanted eucalyptus (we even had eucalyptus on our invites) and thistles and other wise was happy with natural flowers in green, white and purple. Three weeks before the wedding, we still had no idea how we were going to get the flowers from Cologne to Bremen. My mom suggested maybe finding a new florist in Bremen. I almost passed out and once I had gathered my brains from the floor said no, it's too late.

A few days before the wedding we still didn't know what we were going to do as flowers so we went to Ikea and bought a bunch of peace lillies that we used as aisle deco and some pretty 'purple-ish' flowers for the stage. After some fiddling, my parents brought the flowers down 4 days before the wedding and the lovely Preuß' brought us the button things for everyone and my bouquet the night before.



So pretty. Thank you, decorators!



The reality:

Oh boy. I am not good at putting flowers in glass jars the night before getting married. It pushed me to the edge. Thankfully, a bunch of lovely ladies came up and offered to help with whatever needed doing and I was more than happy to let them do this for me. Seriously, the edge and I were close friends that night because of these flowers. I was also seriously concerned when the flowers arrived that there wouldn't be enough of them, but it turned out to be the exact right amount. Always trust the professionals, eh? The only real issue was that they forgot to make Mareike's Maid of Honour bouquet so she had to pop off to the flower shop before the wedding with the Groom's button thing and 10€ and ask them to make her a bouquet to match. It ended up being beautiful. We used the petals that fell off the flowers for Aurora to throw and that worked really well as well. All in all, it was awesome. When I arrived at our venue for the evening and saw all the flowers lined up on the tables and the way they quietly made the room ours, I was so thrilled and grateful for everyone who helped.

Garden roses, thistles and other things I don't know the names of.

The flowers were such a huge collaberative effort and I am so grateful to everyone who helped. Another big thank you here!!!

p.s. see Patrick's ginormous button thing? I thought that was Mareike's bouquet! I had already started to take it apart to make it smaller when I was informed by many that as the Groom he needs a big bouquet on his chest. I listened and it is now useful as something for us to laugh about in pictures.





Wedding details - where we put the seating cards.

Finally!!! I finally got the pictures I needed off my dying laptop and can now show some of the projects I and Mareike (and sometimes even Patrick) did for the wedding. I wanted to do this as chronologically as possible (more for my sake than yours - I want to look back on this one day, you know?)

So - here is the first project that I did for our wedding. Now that I think about it, I was working on this pretty much a year ago this month. I did it originally to replace something Mareike took when she moved and liked it so much that I decided to use it in our wedding. I was originally just going to use it as something pretty on the table, but about a week before we got married we still did not have a nice way to show people where they are sitting so this became our seating plan.

I have had this shelf since before we moved from Canada. I painted it with my mom when we still lived there, so I was at the oldest 11 when I did it. It has looked like this ever since:



I am especially fond of the sponge technique

When I first moved to Bremen I sorted this puppy out and put it in our stuff for garage sale. It had been in storage for years, was yellow with sponged on white and really not quite my style. I lacked vision. Needless to say, nobody bought it (shocker!) so it sat in the basement. When Mareike moved out, I needed somewhere to put my keys and things that just always seem to need a ledge to sit on. Mareike had taken her Ikea chalkboard and moved so I had to get creative. I stumbled across this and decided to revamp it. I dusted it off, gave it a wipe down, bought paint and started painting. I didn't sand it cause I didn't have sand paper and I like things done NOW when I decide to do them. So above is what it looked like before. This is what it looked like at the wedding:

Pretty, eh?

I painted it a pale grey-green and covered the back in burlap. I love burlap. I made the little seating cards out of purple card paper that I found at ideeCreativ and wrote on with white pen, the names on the front, the table number on the back. I used round headed brass fasteners to hang the cards on to string that I had hung in the openings by folding down the arms at the back so that the cards could be hooked on. It was a tight squeeze (as you can see by the cards on the table) but I love it.

We have tried not to waste things from the wedding and this would be pretty hard to waste as it was made for my hallway before it was made for the wedding. So here it is now, in all it's messy glory. I think I'm going to try and take off the string now that it's not needed. Then it won't be so messy, you know?

Keeping it real.

So there you go. The first thing I made, not really for the wedding but it served it's purpose well. I love the green with the brown. And I love burlap. And that's all I have to say about that. Except that's not all I have to say about burlap. Plenty more about that to come!

p.s. my friend Chrissi took the 'wedding' picture. Gorgeous. her website is http://www.loeffler-photos.com/ check her out!

Tomorrow.

I've been in a funk recently. Can recently also mean for a really long time? It just sounds better. I find it hard to get on and do things, am much 'happier' (but not really happier) when I am sitting at home doing very little that involves movement. It's not great. Not how I want to live, but it is how I am living most of the time.

One step to change this I decided on before Christmas - for 6 months (so till the end of June, I guess. Or beginning? Patrick would know, I suck at math) I have decided not to be the one to turn on the TV. This includes anything that could be watched except for the odd short YouTube clip that someone posts on Facebook. So far, I have only been weak once, and then only got through half of what I was cheating with before the guilt made me turn it off. There are a few things that help keep this realistic: if I were to get really sick, then I could watch TV, if Patrick wants to watch something, then I can watch with him. This means that it is more of a conscious watching together and not some brainless activity. In order for me to have things that I can do instead, I decided to read a book a week, which so far is also going well.

However, it isn't quite having the effect I wanted. I am still in my funk. (Ok, ok. Let's call a spade a spade. Laziness.) And it is proving extremely hard to master. So. As of tomorrow morning I will be making a renewed effort at getting up earlier so that I can do my sports in the morning, and re-practicing self-discipline. I have a feeling this will be a life-long battle but I am glad I know that it is one that I will win eventually.

So tomorrow I will do the laundry, get church ready, clean the hall and my house, cook delicious food and do Jillian and lots more. One step at a time.

And my motto will be borrowed from Goethe: What is not started today, is never finished tomorrow.