Hello everyone! I’d like to apology to all of my readers, all half dozen of you, for my abhorrent blog posting record. This new little business of mine is really “flowering” (sorry for that) and is keeping me quite busy. I have tons of pictures from summer weddings, scattered all over my hardrive and my inbox and in the portfolios of kind-hearted photographers I have yet to contact. I’ve decided to throw an easily accessible handful of them up on this post today, just to wet your appetites. Big, big things are coming my friends! Soon I will finally, finally have a proper website with a big, drool-worthy gallery of my work. I will also be in a new studio space to be lovingly remodeled by my wonderful boyfriend and my wonderful little brother… so nice to have strapping young men in one’s life. But what I’m really excited about are 2011′s remaining weddings and floral projects. I’ll throw out this teaser… late October, Jose Garces’s newest restaurant, Cira Center Loby, four hundred candles, twenty six fat tree trunks… interested? Stay tuned!

 

Congratulations to Jessica and Jason! They got married 4th of July weekend at Tyler Arboretum. Jess and Jay totally embraced the essence of a mid summer wedding

… their bridal party was all bright colors and high spirits! I love the green dresses and yellow shoes. Jess wasn’t afraid to have color in her bouquets either. Her girls carried bright gerbera daisy bouquets, one in red, one in orange and one in yellow. Jessica wanted her bouquet to be full of golden yellows and oranges with some pink accents. I used some giant yellow garden roses, yellow and orange ranunculus, and yellow and orange poppies for the gold, and some fluffy peonies for the pink. I got lucky on those ranunculus and peonies… their season was winding down and my wholesalers were doubtful about what I could get. I had some dahlias and capriccio gardens roses standing by, just in case! Jason’s bout complimented his lovely bride’s bouquet with a nice little bundle of ranunculus and pittosporum leaves.

His fellas wore gerbera boutonnieres to match the ladies.

Thank you to Sarah Miller Photography for the beautiful pictures!

Photography by: Girl Photography

A couple weekends ago I put together some sample bouquets for a bridal event at Nicole Miller, an equisite dress shop in the Bellevue on Broad Street. Hopefully I’ll have more images soon, but in the meantime, I call this particular arrangement the Summer Explosion Bouquet! It’s Big Big Big, and Bright Bright Bright, filled with peonies, vanda orchids, poppies and one giant head of summer allium.

Dress: Nicole Miller Bridal

Photographer: Marjorie Amon Photography

This past weekend I was lucky enough to “play with my flowers” for a friend’s wedding. Adam and Allison are two of the coolest, nicest people on the planet and I was thrilled to be a part of their Big Day. More professional pictures of their wedding are forthcoming, but in the meantime, here is the bounty from the facebooks!

Allison is a landscape architect and she wanted a very textural, unusual bouquet full of succulents and funky flowers in muted tones. As a florist, I go nuts when a bride wants to deviate from the traditional and experiment outside the roses-callas box. Over the past two months, I collected every cool succulent I could find. In the end, fourteen of them were paired with hellebores, craspedia, ranunculus, tulips, seeded eucalyptus and gerbera “hearts” to make this rich, funky bouquet.

The bridesmaids carried bright, happy yellow bouquets full of parrot tulips, ranunculus, gerberas and craspedia, accented with bright green succulents.

Adam’s boutonniere was pretty cool too. I paired two green hellebores with a small echevaria succulent and added a seeded eucalyptus “tail”.

Congratulations guys! I’m so happy for you both.

Sometimes I get so busy corralling my flowers into their arrangements and then about town, that I forget how much I enjoy having them in my life. After a big event I usually have leftover flowers. I often give them away, or toss them in vases around my house, but sometimes I’m so exhausted that they never leave the “leftover bucket” that gets dumped in my kitchen. A few days ago I put this simple, spring time arrangement of campanula, hybrid delphinium and tulips together for Spa Rescue’s table at the flower show…

Afterwards, I only had a couple sprigs of campanula left. They were so perfect and lovely… I just couldn’t leave them in the bucket. There was a stash of wine bottles on top of my fridge, that I’ve been cutting to turn into vases. I grabbed a green bordeaux bottle and tossed the campanula in with a handful of craspedia. In seconds I had this lovely little arrangement that has been making me smile for days now, tuning my city apartment into a country cottage. No crazy designs, no elaborate pruning… just some sprigs of flowers in a wine bottle, created in about seven seconds. Sometimes it’s good to remind myself that simple can be best.

I mentioned in my last post that I had put together some flowers for Sarah Miller Photography  last Sunday. They were for display at a bridal trunk show at Nicole Miller Dress Shop. It was a “Succulents Gone Wild” arrangement that I did in a fat little tea pot.  Succulents are very heavy, so they’re normally displayed either in soil, or in a tightly packed arrangement or bouquet. I wanted to experiment with something more playful, and a little more wild. The result had a looser, lighter look, sort of like the tea pot got over-run by the garden! 

I was messing around with some left over succulents, thistle, craspedia, eucalyptus and patience roses that I had after doing an arrangement for Sarah Miller Photography on Sunday…

My kitchen obliged me with a jasmine tea tin to use as a vase (my jasmine tea is now in tupperware). I grabbed a couple pictures in the park later that day. Pretty!