Adventures with Flowers.

When Annika first asked me do the flowers for her wedding, I went straight to kcls.org and put every floral design book I could find on hold. I had these great plans to do a bunch of research and take notes and then go out and buy flowers and practice practice practice. As is somewhat typical with me, there was a lot of procrastination involved in the process and only about half of the "great plans" ever came to be.

To be fair, I did go through every single one of the books that I brought home from the library and I took some really good notes. I learned all about the treatment of flowers and wiring and taping and about how I need to invest in a better pair of floral sheers etc etc. I even went online and sifted through hundreds of photos of hydrangea bouquets and watched a few youtube videos on how to put bouquets and corsages together. It was all very informational but in the end I knew the only way I was going to get results was if I actually had the flowers in hand and could really feel and visualize everything for myself.

So... in the week before the wedding I made a stop at Metropolitan Market after work and picked up some flowers to practice on. I knew we would be using hydrangeas and that was about it. I hadn't decided what I wanted to use with them so I just picked out a few extra things that I thought might go nicely with them. Gladiolus, eucalyptus and some yellow stuff that I was particularly fond of.

Bouquest I can handle, what I was most worried about was the corsages. In fact, I was somewhat terrified by the idea. It was one of those things I knew I could definitely handle but needed to prove it to myself to boost my confidence a bit. So that was what I spent my practice time working on.

Left: First attempt.           Right: 3rd or 4th attempt. Much better

The first one I did was really just to get things moving. I wanted to make a corsage as quickly as possible so I could just kind of get a feel for the technical aspect of working with the tape and wire and putting things together. Then I calmed down a little and allowed the creative juices to flow.

Just playing with the flowers... thought it would be funny to see how large and ridiculous I could make the corsage.

Of course Charlie was helping. He was very curious about all of the flowers and string and ribbon and other things he was finding on the floor. Until he discovered Tara's knitting and took to chasing the ball of yarn -- turns out he is a cat after all. All this time we were worried he might be some strange looking puppy dog.

Tara.

The final products! I think by the end of the night my mom and I had really figured out the whole corsage thing. Mine is on the left, hers is on the right. I decided the process was lots of fun and not nearly as scary as I thought it was going to be. Having "mastered" the art of corsage making, my butterflies about the wedding weekend and my short stint as a pretend florist seemed to calm down just a bit.

**Wedding post to follow! Stay tuned.**