Saturday, January 26, 2013

Tropical Wedding Bouquet for a Destination Maui Wedding

It's been a busy week of getting flowers done in between being a mom. Today, I finished this beautiful tropical bouquet for my client, Malia. She's from Canada and is planning to get married in Maui next month. She shared with me a photo of a silk floral arrangement that she really liked. This bouquet contained plumerias, Asiatic lilies, calla lilies, 3 different colored roses and greenery.
We made a few modifications to the original bouquet, but overall the color scheme and flowers were included. We added pave rhinestone button accents with a cranberry ribbon wrap and bow.  It's definitely vibrant and full of color. It makes you long to be on the islands smelling the beautiful plumerias and enjoying the beach! Congratulations to Malia and her fiance!

Thursday, January 24, 2013

Magnolia Cake Flowers for a Destination Wedding in the Dominican Republic

I'm always in awe of how far my flowers will travel! Leslie found me via Etsy and asked if I could make her 3 magnolia cake flowers like the one I have listed in my shop but in specific sizes. This is how they turned out. Leslie is having a destination wedding in the Dominican Republic in a couple more months!

Best wishes to Leslie and her fiance and thank you for asking me to create your cake flowers!

Real Wedding Image - Single Stem Peony Blooms for Bridesmaids

This morning I received a lovely photo from one of my client's who got married this past summer. She had seen my previous blog post about the creamy yellow, single stem peony bouquets for bridesmaids, and it reminded her to send me a photo from her wedding. Working with Ann was so awesome, such a super sweet bride and easy to work with. Just absolutely gorgeous! This photo is courtesy of Nina Perini Photography.

Tuesday, January 22, 2013

Creamy Yellow, Single Bloom Peony Bouquets for a Destination Wedding

 A client contacted me last year to see if I could create single bloom peonies for her 8 bridesmaids for her 2013 destination wedding. Her colors are yellow and gray. After some discussion she had really wanted the stems to be longer, but it was discussed after the flowers were already created. So instead of trying to redo the stems, we agreed to add really long silvery/gray bow/ribbon to elongate the look.
 I am sure the single bloom peony bouquets will be stunning with the bridesmaids' yellow dresses. I am hoping the bride shares photos with me after her wedding!
 

Monday, January 21, 2013

Gifts for Chinese New Year

 
One of my son's classmate's mom asked if I could create some arrangements to give to her mother-in-law and grandmother-in-law for Chinese New Year, but we agreed that something they could have all year long that would be beautiful yet have meaning made more sense. So since my friend likes pink, we went with a single pink peony bloom with a bud and leaves in a simple glass vase.


Wednesday, January 16, 2013

Snippets from my BHLDN Order...

I thought I would share some photos and my journey as I created the exclusively designed cake topper for BHLDN's Spring 2013 collection. Discussions began in mid November, but we didn't finally agree to everything until mid December. I hadn't even created a sample for them to review up until this point. Finally I got the go ahead and created the sample for them to review and they loved it. They requested minor changes, but overall they were quite pleased with the cake topper. They didn't want any plastic or silk fillers that I often use in my arrangements because they wanted it to be 100% handmade out of clay!  

Once I got the go ahead which was literally a week and a half before Christmas, I started making flowers. This was no small task. Every cake topper had A LOT of flowers. Thousands of petals were made in the process. I think I literally cranked out 40 peonies in 12 hours! It was a race against the clock in between hosting Christmas dinner with my family and all the holiday gatherings. I managed to finish all the flower elements before New Year's Eve and then the final assembly began the week between Christmas and New Year's and the week after that. Even after all the flowers were made, I had a lot of things to wire, wrap with tape and paint. I even cut my finger cutting wires. That's always a fun experience. Luckily this time it was just a graze and fortunately the flower making was complete. The casualties of my job make me appreciate how important my fingers and hands are. I was sore on a daily basis sitting in my studio cranking out every single petal, flower and leaf! Did I mention the large flowers all got calyx too? 
I even needed to figure out my own packaging and how I was going to package this beautiful cake topper. They said it didn't have to be anything fancy, but I wanted it to have appeal. I had hoped to find sturdier boxes, but with such a short lead time to get everything to their distribution center, I had to make do with what I could find short notice.
I'm so grateful for the opportunity to create something beautiful that is completely handmade for BHLDN. To know that they appreciate all the work that was put into the cake topper is reward enough. All the energy, time and sore body parts was worth the effort. Thank you to the amazing staff at BHLDN, they are truly AMAZING! If you're interested in purchasing the exclusive design with BHLDN, please click here.

Blush Pink and White Heirloom Roses for Valentine's Day

An international client of mine contacted me again and asked me to make some special roses for his significant other for Valentine's Day. It's always a great compliment to have reorders from past clients and that they continue to enjoy my work. He thought of long stem roses and he wanted a lighter shade of pink. He said that she liked the white ones I did for her last time so maybe we could incorporate the two colors. So I decided to do a blush pink with white outer petals. These are 18 inches long. 

I hope this weekend I can come up with some Valentine's Day arrangements to post on my Etsy site as it's getting close to February 14th!