Wedding Flowers from Sam's Club

Boy, has this post has been a long time coming.  Not only have the lovely bride and groom been married for almost a year, my last post about this was over 7 months ago.  Oh, well, I do try but I'll never be a super organized, totally on the ball, got-it-all-together kind of person.  It's kind of my thing.  As I was looking at pictures from this past year trying to gather pictures for a Christmas card (which, of course, I never finished), I realized that I had prepared at least five different posts for this blog that I never even attempted to post.  I'm talking about prepping, making, and even taking all the pictures along the way and didn't even blog about it.  Yet.  I'm totally going to get around to it. You'll see.  Hopefully.

So, Shannon and I ordered these flowers from Sam's for her wedding.  We made sure to place the order online on March 2 to have them delivered to my house on March 19.  If you give yourself enough time, you can specify the date that you want them delivered. Here's what we ordered.

 I did tons of research on this so I knew I needed to let the flowers have 24 hours to re-hydrate.  I also learned the stems need to be cut an angle (along with a couple of angled notches to make sure they can get as much water as possible) before putting them in very cold water.  They need to be cut every day but not too much.  I knew we wanted these hydrangeas as tall as we could get them for the centerpieces.   They also need clean water every day.  I made sure to be home on that day so I could get them in water immediately.  I went to Home Depot the day before and bought 6 paint buckets and it was no where near enough.  As soon as I realized this, I sent Jamie back to get a couple more but later realized it still wasn't enough!  That should give you an idea of how big these hydrangeas were!

The buckets are ready and waiting
 for the flowers to get here.

After the flowers arrived...and that's only one side of the table!

I had flowers everywhere!  I even had to put some tulips in my Halloween candy bowl!

Here is what they looked like as they were coming out of the boxes.

Blue Hydrangeas

Green Hydrangeas

Yellow Tulips

This box with the greenery was a little beat up.

But they were fine when I opened the box.

There are a couple of things that I noticed right away as I was opening the flowers.  Some of the white and blue hydrangeas had some spots.

I am not an expert when it comes to flowers but my feeling was that this was a bad sign.  So I immediately called Sam's.  The customer service representative was very helpful.  She asked for pictures of the spotted flowers and then said she would call back.  It took a while but she did.  Once she did, she asked what I would like to do.  She said she could either send out another order overnight or refund the order.  By this time, the flowers had been in the water for at least 5 hours and were perking up just like all the other flowers with no spots.   I knew, if everything went according to plan, we would have extra flowers so I thought we should wait and see how the flowers were doing the next morning.  This would still give us enough time to get an overnight replacement order if necessary.  By the next morning most of the flowers were fine but some of the hydrangeas that had spots were a little droopy.  I called the same customer service representative back and informed her that I thought we would be fine being that we had some extra flowers.  Then she offered to refund the money for the hydrangeas that had the spots.  Of course, I took her up on that!  And I also let her know that all the other flowers we ordered were in great shape.

Here is what they looked like as the centerpieces started to come together on Friday morning.  By this time, they had been sitting in the cold water re-hydrating for about 48 hours.

These are not quite finished.  I knew it wouldn't be easy to transport them to Athens with the tall willow branches in them.  So those were put in when we got to Hotel Indigo.

Here are some pictures of the finished product.  Each of the hydrangea centerpieces had blue, white and green hydrangeas, white snapdragons, amaranthus, eucalyptus, and natural curly willow branches.

The Bridal Bouquet

Centerpieces in the Rialto Room

These tulip centerpieces were on the smaller tables in the Rialto Room at Hotel Indigo.

These are the hydrangea balls I made in another post.

It was truly a beautiful wedding and I felt so lucky to be a part of it!  Now that I got this post done, maybe I'll get really motivated finish all my other posts from this past year.  Here's to hoping!

Hydrangea Balls

Hi All!

Its been a while.

I know.

Stop giving me a hard time!

Yes, I've been a little slack when it comes to Booger & Pokie but I do at least have a good reason.  I've been helping my friend, Shannon, with her wedding!  Which brings me to the subject for today's post.  This will be the first in a series of wedding related posts.  I had so much fun with all these wedding activities.

I was so blessed to have my mom plan every detail of my wedding.  I know some brides like to be more hands on but, at that point in my life, I was so happy to just pick out my dress and show up where I was told.  So with all this planning being so new to me, I thought others might like to know what we did, what worked, and what didn't work.

So the first lesson I learned was to plan ahead, way ahead.  As the wedding gets closer, you realize you will only have so much time to get things set up at the wedding location.  Anything you can get done ahead of time, no matter how small, do it!  Shannon knew she wanted hydrangea balls to go on the wood arbor during the ceremony.  I am not usually a fan of silk flowers because they always look so fake to me.  But if we were to use real hydrangeas, they would have had to be made to close to the wedding. And I knew there would be so many other things to do.  So the silk flowers were the best option.




a finished hydrangea ball on a glass candlestick (a great way to reuse them for the reception)

Here's what I used:
6 6" Styrofoam balls
14 Ashland Hydrangea stems from Michael ( I used 4 blue, 5 green and 5 white)
4 packages of Long Pearlized Pins
1 1/2" grosgrain ribbon
2 packages of twist pins

I had a picture in mind of the exact color hydrangeas I wanted for these balls.  Of course, I always get an idea stuck in my mind.  I tend to fixate on it, really build it up in my head and spend lots of time thinking about how beautiful it will be.  Then, I spend hours looking for that exact thing with no luck!  Because nothing ever matches the crazy I can create in my head!

Anyway, I  couldn't find exactly the right colors of hydrangeas so I got several different shades of blues to get the effect I wanted.  I pulled all the flowers off the head of the stem and separated them into piles.  I usually put 2-3 different color petals together with blue behind the lighter colors most of the time.  I attached each group to the Styrofoam ball with one long pearlized pin and continued this way around the whole ball until it was covered.

To attach the ribbon...I first thought we would drill a hole through the balls, thread the ribbon through, and tie it at the bottom.  This would work but I wanted to give the bride the option to sell these after the wedding if she wanted to.  I decided to attach the ribbon with twist pins instead.  This way, if another bride wants to use these but would rather have a different color ribbon, it wouldn't be too difficult to replace. 





Here they are hanging behind the beautiful bride and handsome groom in the courtyard of the Hotel Indigo in Athens, GA.