The perfect DIY wedding flowers package, Sweet Collections
February 3, 2026
Looking for a budget friendly DIY wedding flowers package, without having to meet an expensive minimum of custom florals? Join the club! Maybe you’ve considered DIY-ing a portion of your florals but you need an expert for the personal flowers? Or maybe you know you need flowers for your wedding, and you have a color palette, but have no other strong preferences. Many couples today are choosing to embrace wedding flower packages, either as a way to save costs and bring heartfelt creativity to their special day, or simply as a way to efficiently move through the wedding planning process.
However, sourcing wedding flowers, knowing how to process and store them, and managing the time it takes to create everything can feel overwhelming. This post is designed to help you confidently navigate this process, by using Sweet Collections, to get the pieces you want that have been carefully crafted by an expert, in addition to pre-ordering coordinating flowers, if you want to DIY a portion of your flowers without the hassle of storing, processing, hydrating and conditioning. Ready to save money without sacrificing style? Let’s dive in!
Why Choosing a Wedding Flower Package Matters
Many couples decide to take the DIY wedding flower route to have full creative control while saving the thousands typically spent on florists. Others are just looking for a quality wedding florist, but are not interested in wading into the minutiae of all the nitty gritty details. A wedding flower package approach doesn’t mean cutting corners but rather making smart choices—from sourcing flowers to designing arrangements yourself or partially outsourcing these tasks. Using a wedding flower package allows you to stay within a budget while still achieving a beautiful aesthetic fitting your wedding theme.
Smart Time Management: What Is Your Time Worth?
BALANCING DIY LABOR vs OUTSOURCING
DIY wedding flowers require a considerable time investment in sourcing, preparing, arranging, and transporting. Consider what your time is worth, especially during the hectic wedding planning period. Outsourcing time-consuming tasks to services like Sweet Collections helps you focus on arrangements you enjoy while the experts handle flower ordering and creating the more complex pieces. This strategy can cut down stress and ensure quality results without excessive effort.
Unfortunately, the decision to DIY your flowers may mean that you have a hard time balancing your flowers and your other pre-wedding commitments.
Without Sweet Collections to help with your DIY plans, you’d likely spend hours researching sources for flowers, deciding what flowers to order, wondering how many stems you need – what seasonal flowers will fit into your color palette, making sure that you’ve chosen a mix of focal, accent and filler flowers.
How much time are you willing to put into the sourcing, processing, conditioning, and storing of these flowers until the day before your wedding?
When thinking about your time commitment, we feel it’s important to consider what ELSE you’ll need to be doing in the weeks preceding your wedding. You will likely have guests arriving from out of town that you’d like to visit with. You may have last minute dress fittings, spa appointments, and shopping to do.
creating a realistic floral timeline
Planning backward from your wedding day, you’d need to set deadlines for when you’ll need to:
- order flowers, likely from multiple sources (ideally 7–10 days prior)
- purchase buckets to store the flowers in
- prepare a space where you can keep them cool and hydrated for several days prior to designing
- schedule time to receive and condition your flowers, which means…
- stripping their leaves
- giving each stem a fresh cut
- placing all flowers in water prepared with flower food
- schedule time for when you are planning to assemble your arrangements.
- transport these arrangements safely to the venue
All of this will have to be done in between your other last minute wedding errands – visiting with guests from out of town, rehearsal dinners, spa/nails/hair/makeup appointments etc.
You may also want to allocate extra time to practice arranging DIY wedding flowers to refine your techniques.
Trust us, this is a lot of work – we know, we do it every day!
But we do acknowledge that there are crafty couples out there who would find this process fun and creative. Maybe you even have helpful friends and family who would also love to help with this sort of project. If this is you, more power to you! We hope the above list will help you make the best plans you can, in order to undertake this project with confidence….and also to have FUN with it!
If this sounds intimidating to you, but you’re still concerned about your floral budget…
We have a solution – let us help, as little or as much as you want!
What we are proposing is that maybe you can save money by DIY-ing some of the easier pieces for your wedding AND hire an expert to help with the harder parts. The beauty of Sweet Collections is that you can hybridize your process. Let’s be honest. In the list above, what parts seemed the most intimidating and time-consuming? We’re guessing the idea of arranging flowers sounds fun. But the idea of figuring out how many stems go in each vase, not so much.
How many stems per vase?
What’s the ratio of greens to flowers?
How many focal flowers do you need, versus accent and filler flowers?
Where will you put 4-6 large heavy boxes of flowers the week before your wedding?
Maybe cutting each flower stem and taking off their leaves and finding enough buckets to hold them all sounds like a bit more than you were prepared to handle. Maybe these steps didn’t even occur to you, because you were focused on the idea of saving money, and getting to arrange flowers! We don’t blame you! You’re not a florist – why would you have thought about all these BTS details?
Lucky for you, this is what we do for a living.
Let us help figure out how many stems you need. Let us receive the flowers (in our studio that was made to hold bulk deliveries), let us cut each stem (with our stem cutters that can cut several bunches at a time), let us mix the flower food and get them hydrated (we already have the food and buckets!), and let us store them in our professional cooler. Let us make the bouquets and boutonnieres and corsages (we already have the stem tape, the wire, the mechanics, the ribbon, the pins).
Then YOU get to pick up (or have delivered) buckets of flowers that are all ready for you to design with, along with whatever pieces you didn’t feel like attempting!
OR
If you would rather visit with your loved ones, and have your hair and makeup done on the day of your wedding, let us design ALL of your pieces, receive them at your venue or pick them up at the studio and have the day of your dreams.
Either way, your DIY wedding becomes a breeze!
All of our predesigned pieces are priced lower than our custom designs; we can do this because our administrative costs are significantly cut by using online ordering. There are no consultations, proposal revisions, and complicated ordering/sourcing of flowers and vases.
Sweet Collections is the best of both worlds. You get to hire experts AND save money by arranging your own flowers!
what flowers are available with Sweet collections?
You also get to take advantage of our expert knowledge in sourcing seasonal flowers! With one of our CORE Values being Sustainability, we are always focused on using American Grown flowers whenever possible. Once we have your color palette, we will choose the freshest and most unique flowers that are blooming seasonally at the time of your wedding. This is the same process we would use if you had ordered custom wedding flowers from us.
The majority of your flowers will be sourced from local and domestic sources (we do use imported roses, but our designs are not rose-heavy.)
- We purchase from multiple flower farms in Maryland, as well as other farms up and down the east coast and California that ship to us directly from the farms.
- We also work with a local wholesaler that assists with other domestic sourcing and delivers directly to us.
- Our rose farm in Ecuador also ships directly from the farm so while they do take a longer trip to get here, they are still way fresher than flowers that have been held in a wholesaler!
Final Thoughts: Sweet Collections Supports Your DIY Wedding Flower Journey
Sweet Collections offers an innovative middle ground for budget-conscious couples. You can pick which floral items you prefer us (the experts) to create, AND, if you’re up for it, order quality loose flower stems that will coordinate with the premade pieces, allowing you to focus your time on assembly and styling. You don’t have to do all the work of storing, hydrating, and prepping of the stems before you begin designing. We will handle all that for you, so that you know your flowers are the same professional quality that Blair would’ve used, if she had made your designs. This hybrid method reduces your workload without the premium florist price, giving you peace of mind and professional-quality blooms.
Taking on DIY wedding flowers can be a rewarding way to infuse your personality into your wedding day while controlling costs. By learning how to source your flowers, considering and planning your time wisely, and hiring an expert to do the hardest parts, you can achieve stunning results that impress without breaking the bank. Sweet Collections offers flexible solutions by combining expert help with DIY freedom—making your budget friendly wedding goals achievable with less stress.
Ready to start your DIY flower adventure?
Click here to see more ways that Sweet Blossoms strives to be a sustainable business.
Click here to see exactly how Sweet Collections works. Wanna know a secret? I will NOT say that the Sweet Collections designs are better, they aren’t. But I will say that they give me the opportunity to be more creative, and that can end up with some really fun and unique flowers. Some of my dearest friends have come to me for small orders, with full creative license and those bouquets are some of my favorites!
Frequently Asked Questions
Great question! Every bride wants their wedding flowers to be unique! First, you can place your color palette in the Cart Notes of your order. But perhaps more importantly, you will receive a personal email from Blair clarifying your colors and asking if there are any other requested inclusions. I’ll do my best to include them!
You can choose to either pick up your flowers from the studio in Ijamsville, or you can have them delivered
Sweet Collections is designed to allow non-floral designers to set up their own wedding. Therefore, there are some things that these packages CAN’T offer. If there’s something that you’re looking for that we don’t offer, you’re welcome to email me to see if it’s possible. This will be determined on a case by case basis.
Sweet Collections is designed to allow non-floral designers to set up their own wedding. It also allows our studio to take a larger full service wedding on the same weekend. There may be times when we are able to make an exception to this policy, but this will be determined on a case by case basis. If we do make an exception, this would not be determined until 1-2 months prior to your event, and it should NOT be counted on.
Because Sweet Collections does not involve a return at the end of the night for clean up, these orders do not involve rented vases. This means that all pricing includes your vase, and they are your responsibility at the end of the night. That said, we do have a buyback program. We will buy back any vases that are a part of the Sweet Collections designs.
