Wedding Recap: Friday

I decided to break this down into days, so here is...

FRIDAY

People don't seem to understand how hard it is to do flowers for a wedding (look, I didn't realize it myself, and I've "helped" with 3 weddings and was a co-production designer on a short film set at "a wedding" for which we did flower arrangements too).

Keep this in mind: you have to buy the flowers for all the bouquets, boutonnieres, corsages (there were 20 boutonnieres and corsages in this wedding alone), table arrangements, and alter pieces (there was one I had to build on site, that was very frightening...) within a day or so of the event because if you buy them too early, they will die. You can't make boutonnieres or corsages until the night before at the earliest - if you are working with hardy flowers like roses or orchids. Calla lilies... not hardy flowers, so that's day-of prep too. You can't make bouquets until the day of. I am a little neurotic when it comes to preparation, and there is literally very little you can do other than plan what the design is going to look like IF you can find the flowers you need at the flower mart and if you can find enough.

All week I was stressed about what we would be able to find at the flower mart, and how much they would charge us, and if there would be enough of everything we needed, and if we could find the very few ULTRA-SPECIFIC flowers we needed to pull it all off.

At 7:15 AM on Friday, JW and AW arrived to pick me up so we could be there at 8:00 AM when the flower mart opens it's doors to the public (after having already been open for 6 hours - flowers get delivered at 2:00 AM on Friday "morning" but you have to have a wholesaler's licesence to get in before 8:00 AM).

8:00 AM - The flower mart. JW and AW are amazing people. This wedding's design called for more than 100 tall white calla lilies, green orchids, in red calla lilies, green calla lilies, white dendrobs, green dendrobs, red dendrobs, red roses, and white roses. The only "greenery" we had was a tall grass (which became known as "bendy grass") to be used as a design accent. That means we had to FIND 100 calla lilies that were the same white - because flowers come in all sorts of different colors, and "white" calla lilies from one grower might not be the same color as "white" calla lilies from another grower.

As we were heading into the flower mart, I got a call from JB saying my boss was sick - but I couldn't go into work until we were done shopping for the flowers because Friday is the last delivery day for the week adn if we waited until Saturday morning we'd just be picking through the "left overs."

It should be noted that - while they SAY they're open until 12:00 noon - the flower mart vendors pretty much close up shop around 10:00 AM. Which means that we had 2 hours to find and purchase close to 300 flowers.

There was a lot of feverish running around (on my part), but the flowers were all found and purchased. We even had time for a quick coffee and croisant before we loaded the flowers up into AW and JW's SUV and drove them back to Burbank to unwrap and prep them.

JW and AW have a variety of buckets stashed around for this purpose, and some special flower-juice that keeps them happy longer. We cut off all the newspaper and plastic and arranged them in buckets trying to keep them from squishing each other as much as possible.

Then I want to work and AW and JW took the flowers to my condo and left them in the office which - thanks to the fact that #1 it was freezing in LA last weekend and #2 we'd turned off the heat and left the office window open - was almost the same temperature as a flower refridgerator.

Then I went to work.

JB brought me dinner (I'd completely forgotten to pack a dinner before the flower mart). My dad and stepmom arrived at 8:00 PM and I gave them a quick tour of the office, then they followed JB home to our condo where everyone sat around in blankets until bedtime. I came home at 10:30 and crashed.

Then had nightmares ALL NIGHT LONG about not having bought the right flowers, or enough flowers, and that when I woke up the flowers would have all died...

Not a restful night.