Non-Floral Centerpieces

We haven't discussed non-floral centerpieces yet - is this something you'd consider, Nicole? Mom said candles inside glass containers would be ok. And, that would be easy because the waitstaff would probably light them. Also, fruit bowls seem to be popular. To go with your colors you would need green apples, pears or limes. Here are some photos:

More Simple Centerpieces

Here are examples of bigger vases with only a few stems in them. Very artistic and probably not to hard to arrange. (PS - sorry about the bad cropping on the top one).

Centerpiece Flowers

Here are some very poor quality pictures taken with my cell phone camera of some grocery store flowers. The colors are a bit off, because in the store they were the right color purple. Anyway, this is just to show we could easily pick up bouquets of flowers to do the simple one flower Martha Stewart centerpieces Nicole likes. The bouquets are 3 for $10 and when going with the smaller flowers, there are about 12-15 per bouquet. The bigger the flower, the less you get. I don't know if buying flowers like this is less expensive at a flower shop, but I doubt it. Someone could check into that. Also, we should start collecting small vases and glasses because we will need a lot of them. Assuming one next to each setting, we would need about 200? Or, one between each setting (1 per every 2 settings) we would need about 100 (I think that would be a little sparse, though). The Martha Stewart pictures show 2 per setting, I think. Then we would need about 400 glasses/vases. I know it sounds overwhelming, but when everything is divided by table and broken down it is really quite manageable. We don't need all the same kind of vase, or glass, after collecting them we would separate them into similar styles and group them that way. We would also need some sort of racks or boxes with dividers (like the old beer bottle boxes) to set them up in. Then on Friday we could get them set up ahead of time and store them in Grandma's basement.

Flowers

Here's another example of a simple flower arrangement in a simple "vase". Also, a bouquet of just lilacs - really pretty, I think! I wonder if it is less expensive to have bouquets with just one type of flower? Lacy, do you know?

Centerpieces

Here's one idea (from Martha Stewart Weddings) for simple and inexpensive centerpieces - basically one flower in a glass or small vase and have them grouped together.