Mint Carnations

I made myself use these mint colored carnations because I unfortunately think the color is so ugly. But I am changing my mind slowly.
My autumn arrangement is growing on me. :)

Orange Wedding

I had my Orange and Yellow wedding today, except it was more
Orange and Garnet Red/Burgundy-ish.
It was a bit of stressful weekend, considering I was in the Hospital Wednesday and Thursday. I just knew one way that Friday would be a serious flower day. :)

Here is a sneak peek at my Lovely Bride!

She's so beautiful!

Plenty O'Thanks

So what do you think of my un-Thanksgiving Cornucopia (sp?)

I really wasn't trying to do fall so I thought I would add some Pink rununculas, Passion Flower, Privet Berries, Eucalyptus, Lavender,Kale, Thyme, and Geranium.
I kind of like it and think it could work as a centerpiece for an event or maybe even a wedding.



But look!
I wasn't the only one, hehe.
jenny said she couldn't help but Goth it out a bit by spray painting hers purple and adding lace.
I think it's cute. :)


Hope everyone has a great Thanksgiving!!!!

Pretty in Purple

I can be in love with a picture can't I??
Thanks goodness for LotusHaus and her wonderful blog.......run, don't walk over to her site if you haven't gone yet! I hate to piggy back her post, but I am in love with purple right now!!! :P

Center Piece Ideas for a Wedding or Event

I have got to catch up on my pictures....it's been a long semester and I am SO ready for the Holidays!!!!
Oh yeah. Back to the pictures. :)

So here are some surprisingly easy centerpeice ideas to try out. We learned different mechanics in class and really forget the flowers used.
{Can't knock free flowers that we use in school. It's practice and in real life I can substitute with whatever flowers my little heart can afford. I mean, desires.}

These vases only have one entire hydrangea stem thats broken apart, a couple horsetail and 5 carnations and like 7 statice sprigs?!?!?! Holy crap if you had vases this would would cost you like $6!
P.S. the stuff holding the hydrangea florets are cellophane........Donovan is a genius.

This one is a square wreath foam you can buy pre-made. You literally just soak it in water and insert whatever flowers you like and then in the middle you can stick whatever sort of candles you like. In this case she used 4 pillar candles in little glass cubes. She accented with hydrangea florets. It can be hung on a door and then reused as a table centerpeice.

This is a round centerpeice using a round floral foam wreath. This one however, was just covered with galax leaves and decorated with pearl head pins and then tricked out by looping bear grass and 4 hydrangea stems to round out the middle. Perfect for a pink wedding!

This guys look hard to make but they are super easy! You basically use a tall cylinder vase, fill with water and then rubber band bear grass up the vase, then fold back over and secure with a another rubber band that you can cover up with the ribbon of your choice.

Here is a closeup.
The whole look is the bear grass so you really don't need a whole lot of flowers.

This one is my absolute favorite. Nixon, this talented guy in class, made this centerpeice and I think its fabulous. Like maybe for a guest check in or a gift table. I can see this at a wedding or a baby shower actually. I think it's the most beautiful blue that I believe is "Lake" from papersource.

I love the sunflowers and the wraffia and the little gourds he threw in for the fall.....

It's just a styrofoam box that's ribbon wrapped and then the flowers are pushed into water picks which are secured in to the foam. Easy Peasy!

Mass Assembly Centerpeice

{In The Now}

I received an email from someone asking for a little help on her centerpiece. I thought it would be easier to explain my suggestions on my blog because it's easier to post than to send a million pictures, and also maybe someone else can benefit from this breakdown.

I had this idea for a centerpeice and I didn't really have a bride who was open to it because the brides I have been working with already had set ideas on what they wanted to do in terms of centerpieces. I remember seeing the picture above on a blog that I read and I thought it looked fabulous and it was sort of what I had pictured in my head. I just envisioned a green, organic garden growing in the middle of a table. Kind of like this:

{soure}

So where the first picture is more of a beach themed wedding, I thought it was still the perfect picture to break down.

The good thing about these types of centerpeice is that you can make one mock up at home, take a picture, then hand it over to your set up person to make them assembly line style.

The basics are a candle dish of some sort to hold your centerpeice. I have seen cheap ones at dollar stores and nice ones at craft stores. But you can always just go with Ikea.
I got these from Ikea and they are priced between $4 -$10



Right after Christmas is when you should be able to buy these at great discounts. If you have a lot of tables, even better, it will make for a more interesting centerpeice if they don't all match so you can collect for a long time and not have to worry about getting the same dish in huge numbers.

You can have one candle, like the one pictured above, I personally like the look of three tiered candles. These are from Ikea, but again, take advantage of the Holidays and also of Micheal's or Joanne's when they send out their monthly coupons.
If you order flowers in bulk go for the flowers that will really take up space and come with a lot of florets on it, like the cymbidium Orchid, its beautiful and it has about 11 heads on a stem.

Spray roses have a ton of them in a bunch and only run about $7 a bunch. Hydrangeas come with about 5 stems to the bunch and normally you need a good amount of to make an impact but in arrangements like this eash stem can be further broken apart and I guarantee you that one stem will fill about 6 centerpeice.
You can buy a Manzanita branch for like $12 and break it apart into smaller sections, One branch might be enough for about ten centerpieces.
Check out the NettleHollowBlog for great ideas and how to instructions!

If you did want to go with a beach themed you could buy a big bag of sand for like $5 for 50 lbs and it would be enough for all of your centerpieces. You can buy seashells at dollar stores as well and you could even incorporate them into your place card setting like one of my brides did.


I would estimate this at about $14 to $18 per centerpeice if you needed say 40.

Not bad I would say. You could make it less if you shopped around the prices of the containers and used less flowers or you could bump it up a bit if you wanted to make it more elaborate.

Golf Themed Centerpiece

It just occurred to me that I never shared my Midterm Project with you?!?!?
The one I slaved over in between my Tango and YouTube wedding!

So here's the deal.
I have an events class that I am taking and we do all kinds of neat things like make floral trees from scratch and make centerpieces ideas with themes and hanging floral pieces....just all kinds of floral projects for events.

So our assignment was to create a themed birthday party for a famous celebrity.
It had to be obvious that the theme represented that celeb so I picked Tiger Woods and made a Golf theme centerpiece. It had to have fresh flowers in it and it had to be an all around arrangement that could be seen from all sides.

I wanted to make something interesting to look at so I stuck to clean crisp colors that represent Golf to me: white, green, and bright yellow.

See my sand trap? :)
I got carried away, hehe.

I also stuck to a circle theme.
I used yellow buttons poms, succulents, moss, scabiosa pods, Galax leaves-
I made a Galax rosette you can't see :(
white mums, green hydrangea, and billy buttons.

The top had a white carnation sphere with a "fore" table number, and a wheat grass flat.
I used golf balls and tees.

I got a 97 on my design, being deducted on points for being too detailed..... ok.

Anyhow!
Thought I would share my green golf centerpeice :)

Green Wedding

Green wedding anyone?

I made these in class and they are meant to be either clustered together or separated and spread along a long table.

A little closer look and you will see they are all Ti leaves that are pinned with silver pins, then they are filled with horsetail, variegated boxwood, rocks, spanish moss, white carnations, seeded eucalyptus, and some china berries.

There are four clusters per tray, maybe at the end of the night you can send them home as favors with your guests. There are enough for 4-5 couples to take one home from each table. :)

Stargazer Wedding {Part three}

I can't believe I forgot about the rest of my pictures from the Stargazer Wedding at St. Ignatius!

I Dropped off the florals at her Hotel room and was greeted by her beautiful Bridesmaids.
Had to take the bathroom bouquet shot!

That room was packed by the time I got there. I couldn't even fit in the room but I had to get a few shots where I could! Building a portfolio is no easy task :)
I made her a last minute Orchid Hair piece but I couldn't get past the stylist and florist and parents and 5 bridesmaids to take a picture :(
So I jumped on this bouquet/shoe shot.

Then luckily I was able to get one of her facing forward with her bouquet


I had to take a picture of the boutonnières in the hallway, too.
I feel really bad because she ordered 14 boutonnières and I thought she just had a big party plus ushers. She was a pretty laid back bride so I didn't question it. But when I got to the church all the men AND women were wearing them! I was horrified that instead of wearing corsages, the mothers and sponsors were wearing boutonnières! WAH! I will never take for granted that a bride and groom may not know the difference again.

The center Orchid bout was for the groom to match her bouquet and her hair piece.

The it was off to sit in traffic to make it to the church across town.
St. Ignatius is BEAUTIFUL!

Her lovely ladies waiting to be cued down the aisle with the bride looking on.

Now its her turn, see the hair piece? Yeah I can't either...pfft :P

She was so cute and nervous, I could hear saying to the coordinator
"OMG, I'm getting married, OMG,OMG,OMG!"

Then we were off to the Hyatt in Union Square.
Again in traffic because not only was it the sweetest day{according to the calendar}
But it was also the famous Nike Women's Marathon in SF.

My lovely friends came to help out, one because she wanted to help me out, the other because she's considering going into the event business and was curious to see how much work is really done on the day of. I hope I didn't scare her because as usual the day was hectic
BUT!
We made it everywhere we had to be and everything looked good :)
The funny thing is they have the same name so every time I called one they would both answer and or come over to me, hehe.

Here they are working on the centerpieces.

Simple Ikebana inspired glass cubes filled with three stargazer flowers, buds, and curly willow.

Decorating the cake was left to me.
I was especially nervous because you can't mess up buttercream.
That's why usually the cake person insists on adding flowers and I always leave the flowers for them.

Also, the bride is a cake decorator.

Yep. That's her day job. A cake decorator.

You can imagine the pressure I'm feeling right???

But in the end, I did ok.
Here was the toss bouquet, I didn't want them to be completely broken when she threw the bouquet across the room by using only stargazers, so I used roses and lilies.

Then it was time to go....

{And they lived happily ever after}

I'm still trying to catch up with my posts.
I have so many pictures to share from school, events, and mock ups....I am falling behind :(

So here we go with some pictures :)

Happy Halloween!

What? It was two weeks ago? ok. then:

Happy Thanksgiving!


Here are pictures of other Holiday pumpkins.

Someone said, I'm spraying mine silver.....


Someone else decided to go Gold.

Want to make a floral pumpkin centerpeice?
These are super easy to make. Ready?

Go out and buy a basic holiday floral bouquet from a flower shop or Trader Joe's or a Costco, break it apart and cut the flowers and greens down to about 3 inches of stem. Soak some floral foam, place it on a round dish that will hold the floral foam(being careful to use a container that has sides so that the water from the soaked foam does not spill over like, say, in a flat dish). Place your gourd in the middle of the foam and then start evenly spreading out your flowers all the way around. You will be surprised, it doesn't take that many flowers and leaves.
Make one for Thanksgiving dinner!

Pink Trees

My daughter plays AAU Basketball and we went to Aneheim for a tournament over the Halloween weekend.
It was huge! I have never seen so many games going on at once. It was the largest 2 day girls basketball tournament in the nation.
What am I greeted with when we go the parking lot of the Aneheim Sports Center???
This pink haven.
How funny that it was a girls tournament :)

Uh...Hi sensory overload. My eyes were basking in pink goodiness.....

Does anyone know what kind of tree this is?

I was already staging engagement pictures in my mind and fantasizing about how we could drive by here again and take quick pictures with my husband.
I'm a huge fan of the cherry blossoms, I just ADORE San Francisco when its time for the Cherry blossoms to well, blossom. So as you can imagine, I was like a kid in a candy store.
My daughter started gently pulling me away claiming she wanted to go warm up or something....