by leah michelle

Today, I crossed a new item off my list. That is, my list of things to do/learn. With both my boss and my coworker on vacation this week (so close to mine!!!) I am in charge of our wedding for the weekend. This isn’t so big of a deal because clearly I run weddings by myself all the time. THIS time however, I was also in charge of a good portion of the florals. EEEK! Basically, I got to make all of the personal flowers for our lovely bride and her wedding party tomorrow.

I’ve done my fair share of boutonniere’s before (hey prom!), but I’ve never done an actual bouquet. Now I have a lot of faith in my creative abilities, and clearly so does our creative director (he’s the one that left me in charge of this task) but I’m not gonna lie – this was a new frontier and I was scared shitless. Really, the bouquet is the one thing that is in pretty much EVERY picture and is by far what the client nit picks over the most. But alas, onward I trudged. (warning – please excuse the horrible iphone pictures from here on out. It’s a Friday, part of me gets to be lazy).

I started out with the boutonniere’s to get my feet wet and get used to it again, you know, hop back on the bike as they say. I used dendrobium orchids with some greenery accents:

except there were 10 of them to make, as well as a big purple vanda for the groom. So this is what it looked like when I was done:

 

with that finished I spritzed them with some water and in the cooler they went. Then it was on to the big guns.

 

This time around I started out with light pink/purple phaleonopsis orchids:

pink peonies, purple vanda orchids, white freesia and possibly some white dendrobium orchids (which I ended up not using):

This time I only needed to wire the purple vandas so I could basically build the bouquet however I wanted. The bride wanted a cascade so I started with my phalonopsis since they are fairly bendy and curved to begin with (all technical terms of course haha). Next I added in peonies for some fluff and because, well let’s be honest, who doesn’t love peonies?

Finally, I added in the purple vandas throughout the bouquet and spotted it with some freesia. I added a few more stems of phals at the last minute and wrapped the whole thing up. Finished product here:

Personally, I give myself a pat on the back. I thought it turned out quite splendidly! I’ll have to see in the AM if it will require any tweaking but I think it was a great first shot. I will also be interested to see how it photographs. I might just have a career in floral design after all! Tomorrow I get to build a chuppa … what a weekend.