My first wedding flower assignment, for the actors Rob Grant and Izzie Steele.
Izzie wanted a very colorful bouquet and crown. For inspiration, I looked at botanical illustrations and the flowers in my own garden, as well as the lovely Elizabeth Park near where I live.
And a wonderful book called The Secret Language of Flowers gave me the idea of using flowers with certain meanings associated with love, faithfulness, endurance, and other positive qualities.
I also invented some flowers, and made up names and meanings for them.
To make the flowers have a soft feel I used mostly handmade papers, loktas, rice papers, which meant I had to hand cut the pieces rather than cut them out on my Graphtec cutter. It was a lot more work, but I rather enjoyed all the hands on work. I also decided to wrap rice paper around pipe cleaners to give a more natural, floppy feel to the stems.
I wanted to have some really bright intense red purple daisies but couldn’t find just the right paper. So I cut them out of Canson Mi-Tientes white pastel paper and hand dipped them with dyes and inks in the back yard. Those are my helpers, Margaret Freeman, and my dog, Dexter.
It took a lot of work over many months to get the amount and variety of flowers to make up all the parts of the job: A bride's bouquet and crown, a flower girl's bouquet and crown, boutonniere's for the groom and groom's party, flowers for the bridesmaids, and party favors for all guests.
My invented flowers: The Frith, which signifies peace, the Firenlust, which augurs profundity, Gentilezza (kindness), the Court Jester (whimsy), and the Steele Grant (endurance), which combines the bride and groom's last names. Both Rob and Izzie started out in Shakespearian theater and so my flower names were derived partly from Olde English words. I had fun.
Finally the work of making flowers was done and the bride's bouquet went together.
So pretty! All my concerns about having so many colors together were unfounded. I was worried that much color would somehow seem too busy or garish, but the effect turned out to be charming. The next piece to do was the crown for the bride. I used more wrapped pipe cleaners to make the basic structure. I found I needed to make a bunch of smaller flowers not to make the crown feel overpowering but delicate instead.
Next were the boutonnieres, which I based on a few of the main "star" flowers from the bouquet.
The flower girl's bouquet and crown were like mini versions of the bride's, and a little simpler, with sweeter, younger flowers like daisies.
For the gifts for the guests, I decided to make bright purple daisies, with Rob & Izzie cut-outs in the leaves. There were a lot of them, so I had to think of something pretty simple to mass produce. The daisy shapes and leaves were cut out on my Graphtec, and I hand dipped the flowers in dye.
All in all, I was very pleased with my first experience doing a wedding. A huge amount of work but so worth it. The wonderful thing about paper wedding flowers is that they last forever!