To think this is expensive?

[ineedsomeinspiration]

Getting married at Christmas, having a small registry office do with close family only.
Got quotes for small hand tied bouquet and they are all coming in at around £80 mark. I think thats a lot for such a small amount of flowers and thinking I just won't bother. Everyone else seems to think I have to have flowers.

They would probably be an awful lot cheaper were they a just a small, hand-tied bouquet. If, however, they are a small, hand-tied bouquet for a wedding it automatically increases the price by 100 per cent.!

I'm making a crochet flower bouquet for my wedding as I don't like the costs involved with real flowers. Going to mix in some lace and leather flowers too i think to get some texture :)

Everything wedding related seems extortionate :(

Buy some nice flowers and tie them up with posh ribbon. Much cheaper. Wedding flowers are incredibly overpriced.

Very expensive,make your own.

I did for my wedding and everyone loved them.

Lidl if you have one near you sell some amazing fresh flowers and the dearest I've seen have been £5 for a bunch and you get a lot of flowers for your money.

You could buy some nice lace,ribbon ect to make your bouquet from a fabric shop or somewhere like hobbycraft.

It would easily come in at under £10.

Have you seen some of the foam bouquets online? Much cheaper and you can keep them if you want to!

Depends how long it takes the florist to source the flowers, train to be able to put them together nicely, and put it together (at the last minute, because you can't really do fresh flowers more than a few hours in advance), deliver them to you. And how much it costs to rent, run, stock and staff a shop on the high street.

I'm having crocheted/knitted ones - a group of friends are making them, then I'll auction them for charity afterwards. You can also make your own button bouquet. Or have a go at making your own.

But flowers, like cakes, take a damn sight more effort than us lay-people give the makers credit for :)

If you make your own, buy the flowers a few days before you make it so the flowers have time to open.

When my wedding bouquet arrived, our order had been misinterpreted and it was a table decoration.

It was dismantled by one of the guests and turned into a lovely simple bouquet tied with ribbon - and it worked out LOTS cheaper.

So this is another vote saying, just buy some fresh flowers and some ribbon and make your own.

Eighty quid for a few flowers! No way!

That's massively expensive.
Have a practice with some flowers from Aldi / Liddl and see how you get on yourself. If you don't have the confidence, contact your local Church or WI and ask if someone there would do them for a small donation to the Church / WI funds - I bet they would.

I got married at Xmas and struggled as lots of flowers are out of season and deliveries were less often. As a result I got some gorgeous silk flowers done. Means 3 years later my beautiful wedding bouquet is still in a vase on my shelf and all the parents still have their buttonholes to look back on etc

Do it yourself, I made my own from fake flowers and they looked real. Tie them with a nice ribbon and use pearl pins and they will look great.

Either do it yourself, befriend someone who's good at flower arranging, or don't have a bouquet. You really don't need them anyway, and especially at a register office wedding. If you get another quote, don't mention the word wedding because you'll be screwed over.

But flowers, like cakes, take a damn sight more effort than us lay-people give the makers credit for smile

Ooh...not quite sure I agree with that. They're both a skill, yes...but when it's your profession, you're good at it and do it regularly...it's not as difficult as you'd think, for the individual, and they are still ridiculously overpriced for the work that goes in.

DH made our wedding cake. It was a traditional, 4 tier (huge amount) fruit cake. The ingredients (including ribbon) cost him £40. The actual making of the cake took him about 2 hours...plus cooking time but that doesn't really count as no 'work' involved. Over the next 8 weeks he fed it with alcohol once a week (5 minute job).

The putting it together and decorating it (including crafting and colouring sugar-paste roses for the top decoration) took him 2 hours.

So in total, say around 5 hours work and £40 costs. We had quotes from cake shops for the same cake, which were between £450 and £800. Because it was such a large cake, traditional fruit cakes took 'weeks to prepare' (um yeah, wrapped in foil in our larder and given a 5 minute douse every week) and because the rose decorations were such a detailed, intricate job.

That puts cake makers on around £100 + an hour for labour...crazily overpriced.

I'm sure youtube has tutorials on how to put a bouquet together yourself.

Whereabouts are you??

A family of someone I know very well owns a florist (recently used on DTTB on BBC3) and even the BBC said they had never used a florist so cheap for what they were able to get .

They are also a wholesale flower supplier so that's why they're cheap. They provide all the local florists with their flowers hence they're able to keep their own costs down. So you can either buy them and arrange them yourself or they will do you a very pretty bouquet for not much money.

But of course all that depends on where you are...

I used these people for my wedding flowers: www.silkblooms.co.uk/ I love having my wedding bouquet on display still. I had a winter wedding, and people kept asking on the day about my beautiful bouquet.

Its expensive in terms of what £80 would but you in the supermarket, but my tiny bouquet was £85 for our wedding which was done on the cheap, and I don't regret a single penny of it. My flowers were out of season but they were delivered to the door on the day of my wedding and its the only time it has or ever will happen, hence not minding the cost too much.

Personal choice at the end of the day, cheaper is possible and would look just as good. I'm not keen on artificial, struggled to find good fake tulips anywhere.

That is a lot of money, admittedly £80 for an elaborate bouquet with roses and eucalyptus and various frou it is not a bad price.

But I would expect £40 for a simpler bouquet with cheaper flowers.

My bouquet was carnations and gyps and from memory around £30 - but it had wired stems etc.

Redo your search and make it clear you are looking for an essy budget option and if it is too expensive you wont have flowers.

And if you're still struggling - buy some silk ribbon off ebay now, go to Tesco the day before and buy a bouquet for £25 from their Finest range. Make your own posy, tie with an elastic band, cover with ribbon and pin.

Put into water and keep in the fridge till morning

I did my mothers as she wasn't going to have a bouquet. Popped down to the florist the morning of, picked up some Lily's and wrapped the stems with yellow ribbon, pinned with a pearl head pin. It was extemely easy and looked very elegant. And I'm not crafty at all.

I made mine and the bridesmaids head dresses, I had a fit at what a few silk flowers on a side comb cost if you said wedding.

I was a student, I did them when I should have been revising.

DMIL organised and paid for flowers. She had a huge cut flower grower up the road, they did bouquets themselves. So long as you were happy to have what was in their green house they were really sensible.

I once did a 27 hour shift at a florists to help out with the Mother's day orders. I was a student and not of floristry :) there were a few of us; we were shown the basics of bouquet construction then we just got on with it. So it's not all highly trained artisans.
(I can still knock up a decent bouquet today!)

I had a xmas wedding. I bought some really nice flowers the day before, and tied them together using floristry tape and then covered with gold wired ribbon which I curled. Cost less than a tenner. And looked stunning.

£80 is crazy! I agree with the others that you could just make your own. No one will really notice anyway, personally I couldn't tell you about the bouquet the bride carried at any wedding I've been to.