Petal confetti: how much to buy, and what to ask the venue first

Petal confetti: how much to buy, and the questions to ask the venue first

Petal confetti is the one thing in this catalogue with a deadline. Everything else can sit on a shelf until you find the right spot. Confetti is bought for a specific ninety seconds, usually outside a door, usually with a photographer walking backwards, and if the quantity is wrong there is no second attempt.

This is the arithmetic, and the two questions worth asking before you order anything at all.

Ask the venue before you buy

Two questions, in this order.

Is confetti allowed at all, and where. Plenty of venues permit it outside and forbid it indoors, some permit it only in one named spot, and a few forbid it entirely. Churches and listed buildings are the strictest, and the reason is usually cleaning rather than principle: someone has to sweep, and paper confetti in gravel is close to unremovable.

Does it have to be biodegradable. This is the more common condition, and dried petals are the usual answer to it, and that is the reason this category exists in the shape it does. Real petals are plant material and they break down. Paper and foil do not, and metallic confetti is banned nearly everywhere for that reason.

Ask both by email and keep the reply. A coordinator who said yes in March is not always the person on duty in September.

The arithmetic

The unit that matters is a handful, not a bag.

A comfortable handful for an adult is roughly a small cupful of loose dried petals. Children take less and throw it earlier. Not everyone throws: in a group of a hundred guests, expect sixty to eighty to actually pick some up, because the rest are holding a drink, a phone or a child.

So the working numbers are these. For a line of guests throwing once as you walk through, buy one portion per expected guest and accept that some will be left. For a static group throwing at a signal, the same. For two moments, the ceremony exit and a later photograph, double it.

Our packs are sold pre portioned for exactly this reason. Fifty individual packs is a wedding of fifty to eighty guests, with allowance for the ones who do not join in. Fifty two packs of mixed confetti is the same order of magnitude. The loose four ounce bag, which fills about twenty small cups, suits a smaller group or a table where people help themselves from a basket.

Buy for the number of hands, not the number of invitations.

Colour, and what it does in a photograph

Petals photograph differently from paper. They are heavier, so they fall slower and hang in the air longer, which is the reason photographers ask for them. They are also translucent, so backlight goes through them and they glow rather than reading as flat dots.

Dark red rose petals look dramatic in the hand and disappear against a dark suit or a shaded doorway. Cream, blush and yellow read against almost anything. A mix is the safer choice and the one most of ours are, because a mix keeps some contrast whatever the background turns out to be.

If the photograph matters more than the colour scheme, ask the photographer which they want before ordering. They will have an opinion and it will be about light rather than about your palette.

Petals are translucent, so backlight goes through them and they glow rather than reading as flat dots.

Practical matters on the day

Give someone the job. A basket by the door with a sign is the traditional method and it works about half the time. A person handing packs out works every time.

Open the packs first if you can. A guest fumbling with a bag misses the moment entirely. Our packs are made to tear easily, but tearing still takes a second longer than a hand already full of petals.

Keep them dry until the last hour. Petals in a damp basket clump, and clumped petals fall like small wet lumps rather than drifting. If it has been raining, keep the boxes indoors and bring them out at the moment.

Throw up and slightly forward, not at the face. This is worth saying out loud to whoever hands them out.

What is actually in a mixed pack

Mixed confetti is not one flower dyed several colours. Ours is built from separate plants, and knowing which is which is useful if a guest asks or if someone in the party has a reason to avoid a particular flower.

Rose petals are the body of the mix: large, soft, and the pieces that catch the light. Jasmine buds are the small cream pieces, closed rather than open, so they hold their shape rather than crumpling. Sea lavender contributes the small violet flecks and is the piece that stays airborne longest. Chrysanthemum petals are the fine yellow strands.

Two practical consequences. The mix falls unevenly, because the pieces are different weights, and that unevenness is what makes it look like weather rather than like something stamped out. And a mixed pack will always contain a flower somebody has an opinion about, so if the wedding has a colour rule or a flower somebody cannot be near, a single flower pack is the simpler choice.

Other places they get used

Confetti bought for a doorway rarely gets used up in a doorway, and the leftovers have obvious second lives.

Scattered down the centre of a long table, petals do the job of a runner for the price of nothing, and they photograph better than they sound. Around the base of a cake, on a tray of glasses, in the folds of a gift wrap, in a bowl by a guest book: all of these are just a handful each.

They also post well. A small pack in a card is a light, flat, unbreakable thing that survives a letterbox, which makes leftover confetti a genuinely useful thing to have rather than a bag in a cupboard.

Afterwards

Real petals compost. That is the whole disposal plan, and it is the reason a venue that bans confetti will usually still allow these. Anything left over dries and keeps for months in a closed box, which makes them useful for a table scatter later rather than something to feel guilty about.

The one thing they will not do is sweep themselves up. A venue that says confetti is fine outside is a venue where somebody rakes gravel afterwards, and it is polite to know which somebody that is.

The rest of Oning dried flowers is on the front page, and the figures behind it are in how we update.