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.

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