TIPS FOR MAKING YOUR WEDDING BOUQUETS LAST
Because a lot of the wedding preparations start in the morning
and go well into the afternoon, the flowers will need to be
delivered well before the ceremony. If it's a warm day, you
might find you and your bridesmaids with wilted, dropping
flowers. But don't worry; there are ways to avoid this as well.
Keeping it cool
Most of the bouquets and other floral arrangements will come in
either vases or small plastic bags of water. These are designed
to keep them moist and pert until the start of the wedding. And
while keeping them in these packages will help the most for
keeping your flowers from wilting, there are other ways to
spruce them up.
If you should get flowers that aren't as perky, then you can run
the ends of the bouquets under cold water as you cut the ends at
an angle. This will help to create new channels for the water to
flow through. Place the bouquets back into their original water
and they should become straighter and livelier within an hour or
so.
What you may read in some books is that you can use ice cubes in
the water to help you make the flowers look better, but this
only freezes the routes of water to the flower, and can cause
even more harm to a sagging bouquet.
If you decide to take outdoor pictures, they you can take the
bouquets out of the water, dry them off with a paper towel and
stand and pose. Once you are back inside, you will want to put
the flowers back into the water once more, to make sure that
they get the most amount of water they can before the ceremony.
After the fact
If you're looking to preserve your bouquet, here are a few tips.
Although many florists can help you with preserving the bride's
bouquet, you can also do it yourself. One route is to hang the
bouquet upside down as soon as you can after the wedding. This
helps the flowers to keep their original shape as they air dry.
The air drying process will take a while, so don't worry if
you're still waiting on them to dry a month later.
Another way to preserve bouquets is to spray them with hair
spray immediately following the wedding and hang them upside
down. This creates a sort of layer of protection around the
petals and can shield the flowers from losing their original
shape.