Fall Florals on Different Budgets
I recently shared how my mom does my floral arrangements. I'm good at a lot of things, but floral arrangements are something I struggle with. She really is a master and does an amazing job. While I try my best to find florals and extras that are inexpensive, the arrangements she does are, admittedly, not cheap. She adds things she already has purchased in the past, like Polish Pottery pieces, that add to the expense of these arrangements. I decided to compare and contrast these with a more frugal version with materials from the Dollar Tree and see how the Dollar Tree arrangements stack up. Let's get started!
Fall Florals on Different Budgets | More Expensive
This year my mom did three different arrangements for me. One is a really big one next to our tv, the medium one goes on our table, and a small one goes on a little shelf in our powder bathroom. The small one is usually just leftovers we take from the other two arrangements and put into the small vase so nothing goes to waste.
For now, I'm only going to compare the medium sized arrangement to the Dollar Store one because it's not comparable to the large arrangement. For the medium sized arrangement she did for me with all of the items you see in there, including the Polish Pottery flowers and the little Polish Pottery bird, the total comes to $181.96. If you don't have the Polish Pottery pieces in there, it's actually only $50.46. All of the pieces that I got for this arrangement were on sale from Hobby Lobby. I like to shop around to get the best deal when I'm buying these because paying full price is a LOT. The larger arrangement was actually $100 without the Polish pottery pieces included in that. If you include the Polish Pottery pieces in the large arrangement (there were only four) the total is $160.
Fall Florals on Different Budgets | Dollar Tree
In an attempt to make a less expensive version of the arrangements my mom made while also seeing if I could put the tips my mom gave me to the test, I went to Dollar Tree and got a bunch of stems. I made sure to get duplicates of everything because that was one of the top tips from my mom. I'm not including the cost of the vases in this because I already owned those, but I did include the cost of the foam for the dollar tree arrangement because I had to buy the foam for that. I used 1 and 1/2 pieces of foam for the arrangement and then started putting flowers in.
My mom usually takes all of the bunches apart so she can spread the flowers out a little bit more. However, these stems weren't very long and I didn't feel comfortable pulling them apart because I was worried I would compromise the whole stem. So, I kept the bunches together, and added them throughout making sure to vary size, color and texture. In the end, I really love how it turned out. I even found some glitter pieces at Dollar Tree that were very similar to the ones from the previous arrangement. The total for the Dollar Tree arrangement ended up being $30.
Here is a list of the stems I used from the Dollar Tree:
Floral Garden 5-Stem Assorted Mum Bushes
Fall Floral Artificial Cattails
Floral Garden Artificial 6-Stem Hop Bushes
Floral Garden 6-Stem Assorted Sunflower Bushes
Floral Garden 6-Stem Fall Wheat Bushes
Floral Garden 5-Stem Assorted Mum Bushes
Floral Garden Artificial Willow Branches
Floral Garden 6-Stem Dahlia Bushes
Floral Garden 5-Stem Mini Pome Bushes
Floral Garden Fall Flower Bush
$30.04 not including vase
What do you think? For only $20 price difference, which one would you go with? To be honest, I'd still go with the one that my mom did because I feel like she did a much better job than I did. It was fun trying to do a Dollar Tree dupe though! You can find the links for similar flowers from the original arrangement as well as a list of all of the ones I got from Dollar Tree linked below.
Fall Florals on Different Budgets | Shop
