Every engagement season, we hear some version of the same plan. Grab some stems from Trader Joe’s or Costco. Build the bouquets yourself. Save the money, keep it simple.
We heard it from Eyely, too. She and Ben had a good reason to keep things minimal. Ben has an allergy to nearly every wedding flower except one. White tulips were the only option, and even those came with real limits. Their plan was one bridal bouquet, a few bridesmaid bouquets, and nothing else. No boutonnieres. No centerpieces. No flowers anywhere else in the room.
Before we let that plan stand, we asked the question we always ask when a couple tells us they want to DIY their flowers.
“However you answer this is totally fine, but I want to make sure you understand the reality of the decision. Do you enjoy intense craft projects on a time crunch?”
Eyely’s face answered before she did. “No, I do not.”
So we walked through what that actually looks like. Stems arrive Wednesday or Thursday. Every arrangement gets built Thursday night or Friday morning, the same days already packed with rehearsal and last-minute logistics. Everything needs fridge space to hold up until Saturday. It’s not a bad plan. It’s just a plan for someone who wants a craft project the week of their wedding, and Eyely had just told us, honestly, that she wasn’t that person.
“Okay,” she said. “We are not doing that.”
This is the part that matters more than the flowers
We could have left it there. Problem identified, DIY plan scrapped, bouquets ordered from a florist instead. But the real allergy constraint was still sitting on the table, and it was still going to shrink Eyely’s vision down to almost nothing.
So we brought in Something Borrowed Blooms, our preferred faux floral partner. The first collection we showed her was all white, clean, matched the tulip-only plan. She liked it. It worked.
Then we showed her a second collection, Jane. More greenery, still white, a different texture entirely. Her reaction was immediate. “Oh my gosh, I love that. Those are the flowers I actually want, if we didn’t have the allergy.”
That’s the sentence we were listening for. Because faux florals meant the allergy wasn’t a limit anymore. It was just a fabric choice.
What actually showed up on the wedding day
Once the constraint disappeared, the small, careful version of the plan opened back up. The flowers stayed minimal by design. This was never about going big. But Eyely and Ben ended up with meaningfully more than the one bouquet they’d started with, and all of it in the fuller, greenery-forward style Eyely had actually wanted. Their wedding at Spruce Hill Events included:
- The bridal bouquet and bridesmaid bouquets, in the style Eyely had pictured from the start
- A boutonniere for Ben and every groomsman
- Corsages and boutonnieres for family members
- A centerpiece on every reception table
- Some of those same centerpieces repurposed as ceremony aisle decor, so nothing new needed to be rented or bought
The wedding that started as “one bouquet, because of an allergy” ended allergy-free from ceremony to reception, with more flowers than Eyely had originally planned for. Something Borrowed Blooms is one of our preferred rental partners, and as with all faux floral rentals through that partnership, Ackin Events placed the order, brought the florals to the venue on the wedding day, set everything up, collected it all at the end of the night, and shipped it back. None of that logistics landed on Eyely or Ben.
The actual answer to “should I DIY my flowers”
It depends entirely on your honest answer to one question: do you want a craft project the week of your wedding, on top of everything else that week already holds? If the answer is yes, DIY can work beautifully. If the answer is no, that’s not a failure of planning. It’s just information. And it usually means there’s a better path to the exact vision you already had, even if it doesn’t look like the plan you walked in with.
That’s the part we think about before you even have to ask.
If you’re weighing a DIY decision right now, whether it’s flowers or anything else on your list, that’s exactly the kind of question we like to work through with you before you’re locked in. Schedule a consultation.