When it comes to wedding flowers, fresh flowers are always great – from the way they feel to the way they smell. But I’ve always felt guilty when a ton of fresh flowers have to be thrown away or left to wither after a huge event. And it’s always sad to see flowers die.

For our wedding, my fiancé and I decided to use synthetic flowers for the table on stage for the signing of the register. We wanted to keep the same flowers in our new home as a nice reminder of the day we took a vow to be each other’s partners for life.

In addition, the hand bouquets for my maid-of-honor and myself would be a mixture of paper flowers and non-paper flowers, inspired by the mix I posted about here.

The entire bouquet was meant to be paper flowers until 1) I discovered how easily bashable they are and how rough I can get during our pre-wedding shoot, and 2) I realized I was running out of time and would rather spend more time on our home renovation.

Recently I got together with a close friend Cherie to do up the flowers! It always helps to have a second opinion and an additional pair of hands. It was also a great time of catching up and talking about the challenges of home renovations. This is the half-done hand bouquet…

We also discovered that synthetic flowers are not as easy to cut as we thought! The trick is to use a pair of scissors to cut the plastic stem and to make a groove in the wire core. If you have a pair of wire cutters that’s great. If not, just keep bending it back and forth and eventually the wire will break.

Just try not to leave cut wires sticking out of the stems! They cut more easily than actual thorns (spoken from actual experience…)

We wanted a simple set-up for the flowers for the signing table on stage, and Cherie found an old shoe box that worked perfectly. We had intended to wrap it in brown paper, but the shocking pink seems to be working really well!

All we need to do is to cover the logo with some ribbon, but if the bright pink is too distracting maybe we’ll wrap it entirely. If I find more time, I may try replace more of the synthetic flowers with paper ones… The white flowers were made from coffee filter papers which I’ll try to put up a tutorial on soon.

Had to run off to select sinks for our new bathrooms, so the work on the flowers will be continued at some other point in time.

Four more weeks and counting down. We’re excited for the renovations and wedding planning to be over so we can finally enjoy a date without having to run an errand. :)