Pretty Posies

Not many brides, if any, can say that they picked their bouquet flowers the day before their wedding.  But in my case... my very non traditional case...  I can!

Near to exactly a day before our wedding I stopped by Mildred's Daughters Urban Farm (the only farm zoned land in the city proper of Pittsburgh) to cut the flowers for the maids bouquets along with a few to use in mine.  I would have picked the flowers the night before but seeing as how it had rained and cutting flowers wet leads to reduced vase life, we decided to follow Randa's (the farm co-owner) advice and go friday midday.  I met with Joan, who does the garden's flower arrangements, around noon and we went to work cutting the Zinnias.  She cut, I de-leafed and the chickens attempted to eat the leaves.  Yep...  Mildred's has their very own farm chickens.  =)  In the end we cut 60 flowers and a handful of other flowers filling over 1 tidy cat plastic container of water.

At that point, I went home and set off on making the bouquets.  I soon found that I liked the simple look of 6 Zinnias and sorted them into colors sets.  I put together 4 different colors for each of my 4 maids.

Then after our rehearsal/dinner... my little sister and I set forth to make my massive Sunflower bouquet.  Despite it being 11pm, she sat there and held the flowers in place as I wrapped them in tons of wire, floral tape, and brown satin ribbon.  In less than 30 minutes we had my bouquet finished.  Sadly I have no pre-wedding pictures...  yet.  I myself (yes.. I know that I'm usually a photo freak but I lacked the time and was so busy that night...) did not take any pre-wedding but I'm sure others did.  ;)