Flowers

If you want a traditional bouquet it is going to cost you about £100-150. These have to be wired and are quite difficult to make yourself but you could just go for a simple spray of lilies held together with a wide ribbon (see the picture on the front of the Wedding Planner on the Misc page)

IMPORTANT the pollen from lilies stains very badly so always remove the stamens with a pair of nail scissors before you use them anywhere where they will come into contact with clothes or carpet.

Check out the Yellow Pages for your nearest Wholesale Flower market. They sometimes are not keen to sell to members of the public, but if you turn up with a wad of cash they are most likely to turn a blind eye! Otherwise supermarkets are a good source of relatively cheap flowers but not always reliable for having exactly what you want on the day. If you are planning to use a supermarket, it is a good idea of have a team of friends available to nip into their local store on the day and check out what is available, to save you having to zoom around.

Don't be put off by the idea of using silk flowers. They are so good these days that when they are used with real foliage they are hard to tell from the real thing, can be made up in advance, bent into shape and are cheaper.

An alternative to a bridesmaid's bouquet or for a page boy could be a ring bearer cushion. This would be quite easy to make by sewing two squares of fabric together and adding some stuffing, then sewing on a couple of ribbons to hold the rings. Or you could sew a couple of lace trimmed hankies together. For an older bridesmaid you could simply buy a pretty cushion and add the ribbons.

Check to see if any of your friends (or your Mum's friends) are any good at flower arranging. If not, most churches have a team of volunteers who do the flowers. The list is normally on a notice board in the porch or in the church magazine. Pop into the church each Sunday until you find the volunteer whose arrangement you like best, then contact them and ask if they would arrange your flowers in return for a donation to the church. This is likely to be a lot cheaper than using a professional florist. If you want to decorate the pew ends, the church will insist these arrangements are moved immediately after the wedding (they make a mess when they drop) so these could be taken to the reception and used as table centres.

Make sure you put flowers where they will give maximum impact, one big arrangement under the pulpit is better than lots of little ones and decorate pew ends rather than window sills.

Again, don't be afraid to use artificial flowers, particularly for swags and flower arches. You could do flower arrangements using real greenery and cheaper flowers like spray chrysanthemums with couple of exotic silk flowers as a focal point.

One of the main difficulties in doing your own flowers is finding enough greenery, so be sure to sweet talk friends, relatives, neighbours with nice gardens into letting you raid them.

Do check with the vicar if there is another wedding on at approximately the same time - it would save money to get together and share costs.

Or you could get married the week after Easter, when the church will probably still have lots of arrangements - usually lilies but it could be daffodils!

Most venues have an arrangement with a local florist, where they are making a good mark up, so it is much cheaper to do it yourself.

Reuse flowers wherever possible. If you have a top table, arrange the bride's bouquet in front of the happy couple and place the bridesmaids flowers on either side. If you don't have pew end flowers for table centres, places like Ikea, Matalan or even supermarkets sell cheap glass vases which hold just one or two flowers for a table centre or small chunky vases for posies which could be pushed together for the head table. For a winter wedding, you could include candles in the arrangements.

If flower arranging is not your things you could always do for ballons. Celebrations do kits to fill your own and weights to put them in the middle of the table.