At 4:15am I figured out that perhaps doing my own flowers was not a good idea
I crawled out of bed at 4:15am to be ready to go by 4:30am and arrived at my best friend’s mom’s house by 5am. Thankfully, when I got there, there was coffee. We chatted for a little while, then loaded up her mom’s van with coolers and buckets full of water for the flowers. Armed with my list of flowers that we had made at the flower trial run, we drove up to the flower mart.
When we got there we noticed that only half of the shops in the warehouse were open. That was strange. Both times we had been there before, the entire warehouse had been open. I had no idea why so many shops were closed, including the one that we had bought a lot of flowers from during the trial run. We hunted for hydrangeas, mums, calla lilies and orchids. Hydrangeas were everywhere, although finding dark blue ones was nearly impossible. We settled for light blue. Once our arms were full, we would trek back to the van and drop the flowers off. Four trips later, we had filled the van with flowers. We only ran in to one issue. There were no burgundy calla lilies. They were no longer in season and they were an integral part of one of the types of flower arrangement. The beautiful yellow orange ones were everywhere; there were even some that were almost black (we thought those were a little morbid for a wedding), but no burgundy ones. Oh well. That was the risk of going up 2 days before the wedding. We found ones that were a dark dusty pink called “captain romance” (pretty appropriate) and went with those. Besides that, things went fine.
THINGS I LEARNED: If you really want a certain flower, you can order it from the shops at the mart. You just need to plan ahead.
We got all of the flowers home and spent the better part of 4 hours stripping roses, boiling they hydrangea stems to preserve them and lining the vases with ribbon. Everything was moving along smoothly. The air conditioning was cranked to keep the house cold for the flowers; everyone had a task that they were diligently working on; then my mother dropped the bomb.
“The white ribbon that we bought is actually tutti-frutti rainbow colored.”
1 week before "W" Day, Things I learned |