July 21, 2016, posted by Gina – Last weekend a good friend of mine served as somewhat of a wedding coordinator. Her daughter was the Maid of Honor but apart from that she has a kind and generous nature so it came as no surprise to me that she would have found herself in this unlikely position.
The wedding was on Sunday afternoon and she met with the bride on Saturday to go over all the details. They went through all the usual checklists and it soon became apparent that somehow flowers had been left out of the plans.
I received a call at 3:00 pm on Saturday from my friend. She was telling me how pretty the location was and sharing how many props the venue had stocked in a very well organized store room. She also mentioned that flowers had not been taken into account, though the bride absolutely wanted them. She told the bride she’d figure something out. As my friend continued telling me about the venue, I could not get past the flower issue. My mind was racing with all kinds of ideas to help her make the best arrangements possible given the time constraint.
Here’s where this story gets interesting. My friend has never made a bouquet, boutonnière or done much flower arranging. So, we devised a last minute, extremely low budget plan. I told her that roses would be the best bet, and probably the only bet, at 3:00 pm on a Saturday. She rushed off to the grocery store and found that there was not enough of any one color except red. Luckily, red was the color for the wedding. She bought everything she could find and then flew off to the craft store for wire, ribbon and supplies.
I began sending her photos of bouquets and boutonnières that would be the easiest to put together. We talked about how to put these together quickly as she had to attend the rehearsal. So at about 8:45 pm the night before the wedding my friend who had never done flowers before with only roses at her disposal began the daunting task of preparing wedding flowers. We exchanged phone calls and photos back and forth for a while until she felt comfortable and was just plain getting tired. And that was the last I heard about the flowers.
On Sunday I was anxiously waiting to hear about the wedding. I received a text from my friend telling me the wedding was over. All I could think was ‘where are the photos’? How did the flowers look? Did they hold up in the 100-degree outdoor wedding? She was busy wrapping things up so it was late in the day before photos started coming my way.
Take a look for yourself! She did an amazing job! Think about the challenge of having to do 6 bouquets, 1 corsage and 6 boutonnières using only roses and having 2 hours to get them done. So the end to this story is that the couple was married, the wedding was beautiful and no one had any idea that the flowers had not been planned from the beginning. My friend is a Rockstar!
