The flowers that you choose for your wedding will have a major impact on the overall effect. While you are busy planning the perfect centerpieces for your reception and designing your dream bouquet, don't overlook choosing something beautiful for your bridesmaids to carry. These are some simply guidelines on how to design wonderful bouquets for your bridesmaids.

Your bridesmaids' bouquets are the largest accessory that they will carry, so it is important to choose wisely. There are a few rules of thumb to keep in mind when talking bouquets with your florist. One is that your bridesmaids' bouquets should coordinate with their dresses, your wedding gown and bouquet, as well as the style or theme of your wedding. The biggest choices that you will make are: color, type of flower, size and shape of bouquets, and special accents like ribbons.

It used to be common for a bride to try to match the color of the bridesmaids' flowers to their dresses as closely as possible. Although this is still done, many florists are getting away from the exact match, because the flowers will tend to blend in too much with the dresses. You can lose the visual impact of the blossoms in this way, especially in photographs.

A nice alternative is to select flowers in a color that will stand out against the bridesmaid dresses, and tie them with a ribbon that matches their dresses for continuity. The flowers can be another version of the same color, like hot pink peonies carried by bridesmaids in pale pink gowns, or go for a modern look with a strong contrast, like orange flowers with a deep purple dress. Sometimes brides will choose to have the bridesmaids carry a progression of colors in the same type of flower; for instance if your attendants were wearing butter yellow dresses, you could design bouquets in a range of purples from lilac to eggplant for a dramatic contrast.

It is very important that the style of flowers you choose for bridesmaid bouquets makes sense with their dresses. If your attendants were wearing long black sheaths and crystal bridal jewelry sets for an evening wedding, you would not give them a bunch of daisies to carry down the aisle. On the other hand, an elegant bouquet of calla lilies would be perfect with such a chic bridesmaid ensemble. And the daisies have their place too; they would be charming with cotton voile bridesmaid dresses and simple sets of silver jewelry for a summer afternoon wedding in a park.

Think about how you would like the bridesmaid bouquets to coordinate with the rest of the wedding flowers. It is customary for the bridesmaids to carry scaled down versions of the bride's bouquet, but there are some other nice options as well. Let's say that the bride is planning to carry a bouquet of pale pink garden roses, bright pink peonies, and green hydrangeas. Some ideas for the bridesmaids would be: the same thing, only smaller, bouquets made from only one of the flowers in the bride' bouquet, or posies created from different flowers in the same colors. In other words, using the example above for the bride's bouquet, the attendants could carry: a mixture of roses, peonies, and hydrangeas, only roses, only peonies, or only hydrangeas, or different pink flowers like mini spray roses and lisyanthus. Any of these choices would work beautifully.

You can even get creative with your bridesmaid bouquets and have each woman carry a slightly different one, as long as they have a color or type of flower in common. When in doubt, ask your florist to make you a few samples to view along with a sample of your own bridal bouquet. The wedding flowers are such a key decorative element at your ceremony that you want to make sure they all look gorgeous.