Weddingnesday… the night before (and doing wedding flowers at midnight)

So… back in October (eeek, where did time go?)
I blogged about the run-up to our wedding.

As a recap, the three days before the big day:
there’d been a funeral, a minor freakout,
a frenzied bakeathon and full-on packing.

And then here we were. The day before the wedding.

All our helpers made it to our venue first.
They put out the benches and put up my trees
so when we arrived this is pretty much what we saw above.

It was a definite moment stepping into our tipis.
The moment I realised that it might just be all ok.
I think I shivered. And maybe giggled.
I would have hugged all our helpers
but for fear of getting weepy!

Then it was down to business…
arranging the tables and chairs,
putting up all the bunting,
hanging our gorgeous ‘do I love you’ sign
that my uncle made for us…

And oh yes, the scary bit…

Yup, the flowers.

One thing everyone said to me
was ‘do not do your own flowers’.

But circumstances (including being screwed
over by our not so lovely bank) meant that
well, doing our own flowers was exactly
what we were going to do.

So I bought some Craspedias… or yellow balls
as I think kept calling them.

And pink and darker pink gerberas…

And eh… broccoli.

Ok, they’re Chrysanthemums.

But my now mother-in-law’s first reaction
was ‘oh, that looks like broccoli’.

Cue some extremely nervous giggling from me.

Then onto the bouquets…

My little sis was a godsend here.

If you follow the pictures above, you’ll see
I’m back to giggling by one point
and she’s just continuing regardless.

Yes, midnight making of bouquets
is not really something I’d recommend.
It can be done. And some of it was fun.
But it was rather intense!

Here’s how we made them:
selected flowers, bunched them together,
trimmed, tied with florist wire near the top
and then wrapped some washi tape
round the middle. (Yes, I’m obsessed!)

Along with the flowers, we made the boys’ buttonholes.
Fox masks for our ‘no photo booth’ photo booth.
And some more bunting. (Because we needed that.)

Our friends headed to bed around 1am.
At 2am, me and my now husband were still
trying to work out the table plans
when we got a text from my sis
saying ‘get to bed… now.’

So a night of sleep for him
and a night of no sleep for me later
and it was the morning…

And my… if our flowers didn’t look
too bad in the morning light!

We rushed around that morning (though kept separate by our friends)
still setting up things… like the chalkboard table plan!

And then we reached this point…

And all that was left was for us to get ready…
because, heck, there was going to be a wedding!

So that was the set-up. An insane, crazy effort
that we couldn’t have achieved without
my sister, my maid of honour, the best man,
his wife (the best lady), my now parents-in-law
and my Dad and his girlfriend.

Thank you all so very, very much.
You really are the best-est friends
and family a guy and a gal
could hope to have!

********

P.S. If you have any wedding questions,
feel free to ask… I probably could
have made this post ten times longer!

********

Pics from day before: from our best lady.
Pics from the morning: Lillian and Leonard.