Wedding Wednesday Recap Part 1

It is Wedding Week on the blog because I'm getting married this week! Make sure you find out all about our love story here and keep up with all the projects that I have done so far for the wedding. Today I am going to share a recap of every Wedding Wednesday and my favorite design every week.

Week 1- Bouquets in a Pinterest World was perfect while I was trying to decide on what flowers and colors I wanted to use for my own wedding bouquets. I had some ideas going in to it but I really decided what to do with my flowers after this post. To find out exactly how I did my flowers check out making your own wedding bouquet for my tutorial.

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These were by far my favorite bouquet in my post. I really love how there is blue in the flowers and of course since my flowers are blue with my wedding colors this really inspired me to make my bouquet with some blue in it. 

Week 2- The Dress, this post I wanted to help out any future brides with the mess of dress shopping. It can definitely be a disaster and take on a life of its own. After my dress shopping experience I thought of Carrie in Sex and The City and how she said that the dress takes on a life of its own in her wedding to Big. I think that can definitely be the case sometimes but you have to go into it knowing that you might get upset and frustrated.

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I really love this dress. When I first went wedding dress shopping I did not want a ball gown. They are huge and poofy and I didn't want one. But I really like how elegant this dress is. It's also very simple and because its not taffeta it is my favorite kind of ball gown. 

Week 3- Choosing Colors, one of the most difficult choices I think during wedding planning can be picking your colors. Once you decide on them their is no turning back if you have started purchasing things. I think that their are some amazing color combinations out there and some really hideous ones. So I follow the theory if you would decorate your home or a room with those colors together then they work together. 

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I really love these colors together, I think they work really well and this is such a neat combination that most people don't think of. I really like this and hope I go to a wedding soon that uses it. 

Week 4- Location of Love, when you are deciding on a venue their are many things you have to take into consideration. I say, pick the one you fall in love with and then make everything else work. Now this isn't always practical but you only get married once right. 

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I really love how this location has the lights, the flowers, and the trees. This is a great outside venue and I'm sure their are amazing pictures from this wedding. I would really love to see them because I'm sure they are gorgeous. 

Week 5- Favors vs No Favors, this post was really important to me and helped me make some decisions about what kind of wedding favors we were going to give out. I definitely got inspiration from these ideas and I love how unique each one is. We are firm believers in wedding favors and I really enjoyed making ours for our guests. 

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I really love the idea of giving out sun glasses especially for a summer outside wedding. It can get hot and be bright so this is a great idea. You can also get them personalized with your wedding information on them and that would be a great keep sake for people! 

Week 6- Having Our Cake and Eating It Too, picking out wedding cakes was a really fun thing for me and Jarr. We went to a few different places and did tastings which is a blast if the cake is good and really terrible if it isn't. We had both experiences but we are so glad we did it so we could get exactly what we wanted.

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I really love the idea of doing something different then a traditional wedding cake which is why we decided to go with something different. We are really happy with our choice and I'm sure it will be delicious! 

This is part 1 of our Wedding Wednesday recap. Which is your favorite post so far?

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Making Your Own Wedding Bouquets

As I've talked about on Wedding Wednesday's  it is easy to let your budget get out of control when you are planning your wedding. So in order to save some major money on the wedding I decided to make all of the bouquets and boutonniere's for the wedding. This has saved us a HUGE chunk of change to spend in other areas of the wedding now. So I'm going to share with you my easy way to make your own wedding bouquets.  

The first thing I did was go to a wonderful place called Basket Market in Oklahoma City. Now what is this wonderful place you ask, well it's like a wholesale hobby lobby. That's right, its wholesale hobby lobby, they sell hobby lobby things in bulk. So it is PERFECT for making a ton of different things for your wedding. I also watched their monthly deals to find out when the bulk box flowers were on sale and that's when I bought our flowers. 

The box flowers look like the above flowers. They are each single stem flowers that come in boxes of 6-12 stems. They have almost every kind of flower in every color, so it made things very simple when I was trying to decide on what kind and type of flowers I wanted. And in case you were wondering yes I was that extremely annoying person who would pull out a few stems of each box and bunch them together to try and find the right flowers for my bouquets. 

Each flower stem had 3 or 4 leaves attached so I made sure to strip the stems bare. This made it a thousand times easier when I was bunching them together. I also trimmed the stems all as close to the same length before I started bunching them together. If you have wire cutters that will make this process a lot easier. I tried to make sure my bouquet base was long enough to comfortably hold with both of my hands, this will be up to the preference of the bouquet holder. 

After I have done this will all of my flowers for the bouquet I then spent approximately 20-60 minutes trying to decide exactly how I wanted the bouquet arranged. I just did this with my hands, there are a million tips to use rubber bands, or floral tape, I used my hands. If you try those other options like I did originally you end up getting annoyed because it doesn't stay how you want it just right. 

Now the best part about these stems is that they have metal wires in them you can bend to make your bouquet lay right. This helps with the flowers position and gives you the ability to have your OCD make the flowers perfect.  

My next step was putting all of the stems together. Why yes, I did use duck tape. This was possibly the best idea I had come up with so far. I have zero fear that my flowers will fall apart or get damaged with my duck tape method. I know they will be secure and exactly how I want with the duck tape around the stems. 

I did add so leaves from the stems around the bottom of my bouquet just to add some more depth and interest. I did the duck tape around all of the bare stems first and then I did small pieces of tape on each leaf piece. This gave me the ability to pull them off and rearrange them until they were how I wanted. Then I did a couple (5 times) of duck tape around the top to make sure they were all secure. 

After the duck tape I wanted to cover my stems. So I got some ribbon that I had picked out and used Glue Dots to attach them to the base of the bouquet. I put several (as many as possible) glue dots on the actual base of the bouquet as well as several on the ribbon and made sure to overlap the ribbon a little over each strand. This ensured that no duck tape was seen and it made almost every single row of ribbon attached with glue dots. I used several dots at the top and double looped around the top and did the same at the bottom of the bouquet. 

As you can see at the bottom of the bouquet the ribbon is just attached with invisible glue dots. I also made sure to burn the end of my ribbon so that it wouldn't fray. I covered all the way to the very edge of the stems because they were hideous after being trimmed. 

And this is the final product of my wedding bouquet. I really love peonies and blue and yellow are our colors. The bridesmaids will be wearing blue dresses so I wanted to incorporate the blue and yellow somehow in my bouquet. I really like the way the peonies and garden roses look together and it seemed like the perfect bouquet to carry down the isle. 

I followed the exact same steps for the bridesmaid bouquets. They were actually a lot easier because they were so much smaller. This made it much easier to keep a good hold on the flowers. 

My wonderful flower storage system until the wedding, I found a box and poked holes big enough for the base of the flowers to fit through. This will keep the flowers from being smashed and loosing their shape before the big day. It also makes things really easy when you are transporting things. 

There is my simply tutorial on how to make your own wedding flowers. What do you think of my bouquet strategy? Did you make your own bouquet or have a florist make one for you? 

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Coastal Charm 
Home Stories A to Z

Peaks, Pits, Praises, and Prayers

This week we have been preparing for a garage sale and working on wedding things. We are going to try and get our invitations out on Monday and my goal is to have all of the flowers, my garter, and some decor for the wedding finished by the end of the week. So far I have the flowers all finished and will be posting a DIY Wedding Bouquet post next week. We are getting really close to the wedding and moving and changing everything and its starting to get a little crazy around here.

Sneak peak of the DIY Wedding bouquets I will be posting about!


Peaks- We have gotten so much accomplished this week! We are packing up the house, working on wedding stuff, and getting ready for a garage sale bonanza. I am so proud of all we have gotten done though, its been a very productive week.

Pits- Everything is getting boxed up and it  makes our house look less like a home and more like a boring rental. It's slightly depressing to go home to a place that doesn't look like your home but it will be so nice when everything is ready to move and we don't have to worry about last minute packing.

Praises- We had AMAZING wedding showers the last two weekends and got so many wonderful things from our friends and families. We are definitely beyond blessed with love and support.

At one of our showers!

Prayers- That Jarr does good on his finals and doesn't stress too much about everything. That our garage sale goes well and we can get rid of a lot of our things we don't need anymore. That the move and new transition goes well and we can all stay stress free and as calm as possible.

What are your Peaks, Pits, Praises, and Prayers for the week?

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Wedding Wednesday- Bouquets in a Pinterest World

As you read about in Our Next Big Step we are getting hitched. For me the hardest part so far has been to decide what direction I want to go with the theme and over all concept of our big day. So I have a confession, I have a pinterest addiction. I am an addict, I could spend hours every day planning the rest of my life on pinterest and never actually doing anything.

So like every bride to be in our Pinterest world I have pinned away every idea I come across that I may like for our wedding. I have like 15 (slight exaggeration) wedding boards right now. So today I'm going to share with you all of my inspiration for my wedding bouquet.

I love the different colors in this bouquet, and the textures. I also really love how it is wrapped with twine. I'm on a twine kick myself right now. I got this from Style Me Pretty. 

Like any other Southern girl I love myself some pearls. Some people might not consider Oklahoma Southern but us Okie's do. I really like the different textures of this bouquet as well but the pearls, well they steal the show for me. I found this at Brides of Adelaide.

I also have a great love with Peonies, they are my favorite flower and I really want them to be in bouquet. Also, royal blue is my color of choice right now. I have a serious problem with buying and wanting everything in royal blue. So these flowers are gorgeous and I like how it has the little blue berries in it also. I found this over at Sayles Livingson Flowers. 

So far these three are my top picks, I'm sure that whatever I decide will be much different then all of these but will have little pieces from them all. 

What do you think? Which bouquet is your favorite? 

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