Makeup: I must thank Emily Forrester for coming to the church on such a rainy day to make me look so beautiful Emily is with Premier Makeup and was so incredibly wonderful to work with. I did a lot of research on makeup pricing, since I literally had NO idea what was reasonable. Emily’s prices were very reasonable, especially considering they included a trial run and travel to the site. On top of everything, Emily was amazingly sweet which made working with her such a pleasure!
Flowers: I was fortunate to have some wonderful friends who can arrange and make bouquets. Ladies, if you can find someone who can put the flowers together, I HIGHLY recommend buying wholesale. I first visited a wholesale warehouse in Alexandria, Virginia and found several things that I could order as our wedding date got closer. When I called a couple of months before to start the ordering process, I discovered that they had gone out of business. Awesome. On to plan B. Well … on to making a plan B. I had read about a website called Fifty Flowers so went to check it out. I was a little skeptical of having flowers just shipped to me, but after some research and a couple of phone calls, we felt comfortable enough to order from the site. A little bit about the process: you go online and order whatever you want. You can search by color, flower name, what’s in season, etc. You need to have a good idea of how many arrangements and bouquets you’ll need so you don’t over order. Fifty Flowers gives you a time line of when you should have your flowers arrive, based on the date of your event and the type of flower. Once you place your order, a representative will call and confirm the order and delivery date. For our wedding, we ordered chocolate ranunculus, some mango mini calla lilies, some regular and spray roses, and hypericum berries. On top of the wholesale prices and free overnight FedEx shipping, I found a coupon code online that saved us another 10%. Our first batch of flowers arrived on Wednesday before the wedding. We were instructed to have a bucket of water waiting, and to get them in water as soon as they arrived. About 20 minutes after FedEx dropped them off, we received a phone call from a Fifty Flowers rep to make sure everything looked OK and she reminded us to cut 1 inch off the bottom and get them into water. On Thursday, when the remaining flowers arrived we had another courtesy call. Since we didn’t need 100 stems to complete the 2 large arrangements for the church, my MIL made some calls to Costco. The florist at Costco will order flowers for you (we took some lilies, dahlias, and mums) in any color they have available and you can come to Costco to pick it up. The wonderful thing is, you’re not obligated to buy any of it! What you don’t want, they’ll just sell in the store. So, we had them order several bunches in a variety of fall colors, but only had to buy what we wanted! I was very pleased with the quality of flower that I received from both places, and would highly recommend ordering your flowers from Fifty Flowers.
