freesia

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The Flower Council of Holland launched their My Favourite Flower campaign with the biggest bouquet in Britain.  The enormous bouquet was made at Potters Fields in front of London’s Tower Bridge.  The Flower council tweeted that people could come and take a bunch of their favourite flowers away.

Passers-by were encouraged to give the flowers to give away to loved ones.  As research carried out by the Flower Council revealed that half of British adults have never been given flowers,  64% of men have never received flowers and 31% of women only receive their favourite flowers once a year.

The colossal bouquet stood 6 metres high and 5 metres wide, it took a team of 6 florists, 18 hours to construct.  It contained 12,000 stems of cut flowers, highlighting the UK’s top ten favourite flowers, rose, tulip, lily, orchid, freesia, calla, carnation, sunflower, delphinium and amaryllis.

My Favourite Flower camaign has a rather clever website where you can pick your favourite flowers and have the chance to win a bouquet of them.  It’s presented by more lovely boys like the ones here, who whizz round selecting the flowers you choose.   The campaign has been extended until the end of the month, so you still have some time to take part and win some flowers.

 

Images:

funnyhowflowersdothat.co.uk – FlowerCouncil of Holland

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woodland-wedding-mood-board

Woodland themes have been very popular since Breaking Dawn was released last year featuring a magical woodland wedding.  Outdoor weddings may not be possible in our unpredictable British climate, but you can certainly bring the great outdoors into your venue with your flowers and décor.  For this woodland inspiration I’ve focussed on using birch and bark to make your decorations, mixed with flowers in a classic white and green palette.

Birch can be used in a variety of ways to enhance the woodland feel of wedding décor.  The thin bark strips can be used in flower arrangements or wrapped round glass jars to make log vases.  Birch logs can be cut into sections and used to hold place name cards, or hollowed out to hold tea lights.

White flowers work beautifully in a woodland theme, arranged with natural foliage to appear as though they are growing.  Ferns, moss, lichen covered branches and bark help add to a natural look. The table arrangement in the mood board looks like a patch from a forest has been scooped up and placed on the table.  It’s got all-sorts of interesting foliage in it like maidenhair fern, lotus seed heads and ivy.  The flowers used are anemones, sweet peas, freesia and viburnum.

woodland-planted-design

image: apottingshedstyle.com

Small plants wrapped in birch bark can be placed around your centrepiece, anything like ivy or ferns.  To continue the natural look wrap tea light holders in ivy leaves and secure with raffia. The flower arrangements can contain natural elements that you can collect from your nearby woods such as acorns, pine cones and fallen branches like larch.

Images:

Large flower arrangement – apottingshedstyle.com

Tree bark cake – weddingchicks.com by Sergio Mottola

Birch container flower arrangements – bbbcraft.blogspot.co.uk

Birch heart lanterns – This Is Pretty, notonthehighstreet.com

Table arrangement: francoiseweeks.com

Birch place name holders –intimateweddings.com

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Amy-Ford-with-her-Chandelier-Chelsea-2012

Essex based florists Curtis & Ford have been awarded two medals in the RHS Chelsea Florist of the Year competition 2012. An amazing achievement! they are only business to gain two medals in the same year.  The floristry competition attracts hundreds of entrants from around the country and showcases the best in professional floristry.  The double success comes after winning international awards in 2011.

The brief was to design and produce a large Chandelier to be hung at a Jubilee dinner for the Queen.  Amy Ford gained a Silver-Gilt medal for her stunning white and lace chandelier design.  Amy Curtis was awarded a Bronze medal for her beautiful design that had a very natural and organic feel to it.

Amy-Curtis-Chelsea-2012

Amy Curtis
Amy has worked in floristry for 9 years; she has studied business management at A Level and gained a Foundation Degree in professional floristry at Writtle College.  Amy is relatively new to competing and was thrilled to qualify for this years Chelsea Flower Show.  She said “Many florists compete to qualify for the Chelsea final their entire careers without ever qualifying… so the fact that one of us qualified was fantastic but to both qualify and to both achieve a medal is just fantastic, we are very proud of all the hours of work we have put in!”

Amy-Curtis-close-up-Chelsea-2012

Amy’s design featured hundreds of branches bound with paper covered wire holding tiny test tubes.  The tubes contained phalaenopsis orchids, freesia, roses, eryngium, anemones and spray roses.  It was adorned with beads, crystals drops and diamante brooches. The intricate design took over 350 hours to complete.

Amy Ford
Amy has completed A Levels in Art & Design, Photography and English Literature.  She found floristry at 21 after studying Glass design.  Amy has since gone on to complete levels 2, 3 and 4 in floristry.  Amy gained the highest practical grade in the country for her Level 4 exam.

Amy-Ford-side-view-of-chandelier-Chelsea-2012

To prepare for Chelsea piece Amy painstakingly made over 100 panels with fabric, beads and wire.   They were sewed, crocheted and beaded; each panel took 2.5 hours to make.  On the competition day Amy worked from 4am on Wednesday right up until the final whistle at 12.45am Thursday to finish her design.  She used various techniques on her piece, she layered and wove bark and leaves onto the panels and dotted flowers throughout.  Amy made 18 beaded panels for each tier using a total of 20,000 beads!

Amy-Ford-Chandelier-close-up-Chelsea-2012

Many of the flowers were glued onto the design but some of the more fragile flowers were placed in tiny test tubes.  Most of the flowers were arranged in a massed style, Amy used reindeer moss, phalaenopsis orchids, white Lydia spray rose, Romantic Pepita spray rose, tanacetum, triteleia, spray carnations, brunia, cotton bush and hyacinth.

Both designs are now on show at Serenity Bridal, 17 St.Botolphs Street, Colchester.

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Breaking Dawn wedding ceremony

Image source Wedding Inspirasi

In the previous blog we had a quick look at the stunning flowers used for Edward and Bella’s wedding.  The designer Tammy Polatsek went to town with the natural woodland theme .  Thousands of flowers were using to make the wedding set, but don’t despair you can re-create the fabulous look without a big film budget.  To help keep your flower costs sensible try to use ivory flowers that are in season when you get married.  The flowers used in the film included roses, delphiniums, stocks, sweet peas, hyacinths, ranunculus, freesia, cherry blossom, wisteria and viburnum along with umbrella ferns, and lots of moss.

Bella's wedding bouquet

Image source Twitter

Bella carried a simple hand tied bouquet packed with beautiful ivory flowers.  It must have smelt truly scrumptious, it contained hyacinths, freesia, stocks and ranunculus.  Freesia and ranunculus also make beautiful buttonholes with a couple of simple leaves.  Although you can’t currently get married in a forest in the UK, you can get around this by having a legal ceremony in register office, and then having your ‘real’ big day with all your friends and family at a later date in your favourite woodland. Or you can of course bring the great outdoors inside.  Create a woodland feel by lining your aisle with tall branches with mossed arrangements at the base and flowers arranged to look as if they are growing.

Viburnum

The floral arch in Breaking Dawn was breath taking; it was very tall and packed with flowers.  It featured delphiniums, cherry blossom and other white flowers.  The arch in the film was so full with flowers, it would be budget busting for most brides.  A scaled down version could still feature lots of gorgeous flowers but with a bit more foliage and moss.  Many florists will have an arch structure that they decorate and hire out for weddings.

Ranunculus

The reception tables had a very natural organic looking design on them, but they were quite tall and sprawling, so the plates and tableware were very close to the edge of the tables.  Things can get knocked over when the table is that full and if your guests can’t see across the tables they may even move your lovely flowers elsewhere.  I would opt for a design with the candelabra at the centre of the table and have the flowers around the base, arranged in a natural style with lots of moss and foliage.

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