Mass Assembly Centerpeice

{In The Now}

I received an email from someone asking for a little help on her centerpiece. I thought it would be easier to explain my suggestions on my blog because it's easier to post than to send a million pictures, and also maybe someone else can benefit from this breakdown.

I had this idea for a centerpeice and I didn't really have a bride who was open to it because the brides I have been working with already had set ideas on what they wanted to do in terms of centerpieces. I remember seeing the picture above on a blog that I read and I thought it looked fabulous and it was sort of what I had pictured in my head. I just envisioned a green, organic garden growing in the middle of a table. Kind of like this:

{soure}

So where the first picture is more of a beach themed wedding, I thought it was still the perfect picture to break down.

The good thing about these types of centerpeice is that you can make one mock up at home, take a picture, then hand it over to your set up person to make them assembly line style.

The basics are a candle dish of some sort to hold your centerpeice. I have seen cheap ones at dollar stores and nice ones at craft stores. But you can always just go with Ikea.
I got these from Ikea and they are priced between $4 -$10



Right after Christmas is when you should be able to buy these at great discounts. If you have a lot of tables, even better, it will make for a more interesting centerpeice if they don't all match so you can collect for a long time and not have to worry about getting the same dish in huge numbers.

You can have one candle, like the one pictured above, I personally like the look of three tiered candles. These are from Ikea, but again, take advantage of the Holidays and also of Micheal's or Joanne's when they send out their monthly coupons.
If you order flowers in bulk go for the flowers that will really take up space and come with a lot of florets on it, like the cymbidium Orchid, its beautiful and it has about 11 heads on a stem.

Spray roses have a ton of them in a bunch and only run about $7 a bunch. Hydrangeas come with about 5 stems to the bunch and normally you need a good amount of to make an impact but in arrangements like this eash stem can be further broken apart and I guarantee you that one stem will fill about 6 centerpeice.
You can buy a Manzanita branch for like $12 and break it apart into smaller sections, One branch might be enough for about ten centerpieces.
Check out the NettleHollowBlog for great ideas and how to instructions!

If you did want to go with a beach themed you could buy a big bag of sand for like $5 for 50 lbs and it would be enough for all of your centerpieces. You can buy seashells at dollar stores as well and you could even incorporate them into your place card setting like one of my brides did.


I would estimate this at about $14 to $18 per centerpeice if you needed say 40.

Not bad I would say. You could make it less if you shopped around the prices of the containers and used less flowers or you could bump it up a bit if you wanted to make it more elaborate.