Unnecessary Projects 101: Pinecone Flowers

Admit it! We all love Martha! I picked up the latest edition of Martha Stewart's Holiday issue the other day and found an interesting project using pinecones. Pinecone Flowers! We have a ton of pinecones laying around our studio from the last holiday season, so I thought I'd give the project a whirl. I carefully followed the instructions listed below (opting for the hot glue gun instead of the tacky glue) and with a little bit of patience this was my result.

{forgive the poor photography...photo was taken with my blackberry}


Here are some suggestions on how to incorporate these cute little blossoms in your wedding

1. They instantaneously spice up a nicely wrapped gift or favor box.
2. They make great hair flowers, corsages, and wristlets for the organic bride.
3: Add wonderful shape and texture to floral arrangements.
4: Can embellish place cards, invitations, table settings, ring bearer pillows, flower girl baskets, table numbers, candle holders, cake toppers....oh the possibilities are endless!

Here are Martha's How-to intructions below:

With floral clippers, remove the pincone's base. Starting at the cone's bottom, slip one blade of the clippers behind a scale; snip it off. Continue, working upward until all scales have been removed and only the stem remains. Fill a small bowl with scales. For the work surface, you'll need a cardboard box (at least 4 inches square) with a hinged lid. Snip 4 inches of floral wire; form a small hook on one end. From card stock, cut a disk a bit larger than the desired size of the bloom's center. Secure disk to box top by poking wire through both, letting hook rest in the center so the wire won't fall through. Using tacky glue, affix scales in a flower shape to disk; the hook will become covered with glue. For a fuller blossom, add another layer inside the first, using smaller scales, adding up to five layers for larger blooms. Use tacky glue to attach one or more cloves or tiny plant parts in the center; let dry, and remove bloom from box

Happy Holidays!

-Kendra

St. Regis Monarch

Christine and Austin got married underneath the main lawn pavilion at the St. Regis Monarch hotel on a cool September morning. We love the endless possibilities that the structure provides and Christine and Austin were open to our ideas.

Here was our initial idea of rigging a chandelier with panels of chiffon:
And here it is in fruition:


We were able to find some pretty cool chandelier options from Rrivre Works, one of the coolest prop places that I've visited. It was like a candy store seeing all of their wonderful backdrops, settings, furniture, etc. Since the morning started off gloomy, the lit chandelier really created a romantic ambiance for the ceremony.

Christine's color palette was cream, white and green with accents of champagne. Here is her bridal bouquet (using roses, lisianthus, stephanotis with crystal accents, cattleya orchids for ruffly texture, and crystal swags):


The ringbearer carried a custom brown, silk dupioni pillow with orchid accent:


A reception teaser:


The cake, created in-house by St. Regis' finest:


It was an honor working this wedding with an all star cast. Melody Walker saw to every detail and was so nice to work with. And, in America's Next Top Model's words, noted fashion photographer Dennis Santirinala was the man on the scene. I really like this shot of Christine:


Theresa Huang, as usual, created some fantastic looks throughout the day. She's really versatile and flexible - go talk to her for all your hair and make up needs!

Being in Dana Point, morning weddings at St. Regis always means loading up at 4:30am, leaving Pasadena by 5:40, and getting there around 6:45 or so. It's not such a bad drive when you get used to it. Nothing that coffee can't cure!

More to post soon!

Great Bridal Expo

We just wanted to thank everyone who stopped by our booth at the Great Bridal Expo last Saturday. We always like meeting brides and hearing about their vision for one of the biggest days of their lives. It also gives us a chance to hear from real people about their likes and dislikes, and what trends are picking up. Overall, we just like going somewhere and presenting flowers in a different way.

For this show, we displayed different color combinations to help brides decide on color schemes. We made different bouquets with distinct personalities and added our signature "frills and flourishes" to the stem. Whether it was a brooch or a pleated ribbon, we wanted to incorporate character to each bouquet. Each bride is different and the details should really show that. For our booth we used a partition to display the bouquets. We found this particular partition at a consignment store and stripped it of it's hardware (hopefully it wasn't an antique piece!). We then primed and painted it and secured pegboard to the back. To the center we affixed an antique mirror and added clean hardware to hang different accessories. Here are our results:

(picture courtesy of joshua yeh : jcy3@inside.artcenter.edu)

We can't complain about the perks of attending wedding shows. Cake studio was there and allowed us to sample (multiple times) their cakes. And what better than a chocolate chip cookie from the Westin Hotel. :)

I'd also like to announce the winner of our raffle - a free bridal bouquet worth up to $165. The winner is Meredith Moyer. We will be contacting you with more details!

And don't forget, for the brides who took pictures with our bouquets, we will be uploading snapshots in the next few days for you to download. Thanks for having fun at our booth! We hope to meet with you soon.

Villa del Sol d'Oro

One of our weddings this past summer took place at the Villa del Sol d'Oro. The Villa is a replica of the Villa Collazzi in Florence, but on a much smaller scale. Check out the link to read more about the history of the Alverno Villa. When you step on the grounds its hard not to imagine the rich history.

Diana and Grant, our featured wedding couple, were married outdoors at the Villa overlooking the sunken garden and lily pool. The Italian Cypress trees framed the ceremony and they were fortunate to have a nice breeze on the warm August day.

The color scheme for this wedding was pool blue and red. We threw in hints of pink as well, to keep the look from being patriotic. The fans were given to each guest to keep themselves cool during the ceremony.

(picture courtesy of Kim Fox Photography)

The bridal bouquet consisted of garden roses, tuberose, mokara orchids, fiddlehead fern, spray roses, dusty miller, and peonies. It was the last of the full bloomed peony season, so we lucked out.

(picture courtesy of Kim Fox Photography)

We used a wooden arch to create the backdrop and kept it light and airy with ribbons and crystals. It was a buddhist ceremony, which featured trays of fruit on the table as well as candles which are traditionally lit by the bride and groom's fathers.

(picture courtesy of Kim Fox Photography)

We're going to be posting more pictures when we do our website revamp so I don't want to spoil it with too many pictures. But check back again soon to read about our next featured wedding. :)

Bridal Show!

Come check us out on November 1st at the Great Bridal Expo. We'll be exhibiting at the Sheraton Gateway Hotel near LAX. Show starts at noon and we'll be showcasing some of our floral work. Even if you're not getting married, come and visit! The benefits of doing a show not only allows us to talk with brides but it also enables us to meet fellow vendors. And of course, sample food and cake!

*here we are at the Cerritos Performing Arts Center, hosted by Patina. We went with a yellow, green, and white theme with black accents. Black...is the new black. Say goodbye to brown. :(


We're also excited to be a part of Festival of Brides, which will be on Sunday, February 8, 2009. The Langham Hotel in Pasadena will host this affair and will feature Mindy Weiss, Mary Dann, and Tobey Dodge. They're the celebrities of the wedding world. :)

More info to come but we'd love to see you there!

We Suck at Blogging

It's been awhile since we last updated you on our floral adventures. The truth is, we get so caught up with work that free time is for our loved ones. BUT that doesn't mean we haven't been working on some pretty cool weddings in the last few months. We also never have time to take shots of our flowers, so we rely on the trusty photographers. Here are a few samplings:

a bouquet of peonies, vendela roses, tuberose, and pearl accents (picture courtesty of Sae Lee Photography)

A fabric wrapped box with lace accents, filled with 'vendela', 'sweet akito', 'leonidas', and 'crazy one' roses. Accented with white majolika spray roses, dusty miller, and amaryllis. (the 'crazy one' roses are the bicolored, swirled roses - pretty cool) picture courtesty of Sae Lee Photography



This was at the Orange County Museum of Art. We had a blank canvas to start with, so we went for a fresh, organic look - preserved moss runners, orchids, limes, rocks, and branches (picture courtesy of John Partridge Photography)Instead of a floral bouquet, we folded ti leaves and used spider mums as the centers to these "flowers" that adorned the chairs on the aisle. (picture courtesy of John Partridge Photography)



a bouquet of green hydrangea, stephanotis, berzillia, ranunculus, cymbidium orchids, and fiddlehead fern. (picture courtesy of John Partridge Photography)

We will try to keep you updated! If not, write us as fleuretica.designs@gmail.com and tell us that our blog sucks. Nothing will influence us more to keep it up!

Unnecessary Projects 101: Frosting Grapes

I love google. At the tip of my fingers, I have the goods on anything I’m searching for. When we decided to frost artificial grapes for a wedding we recently designed however, I couldn’t find any helpful tips. Even my most trusted friend, Martha, deserted me in my darkest hour. So we took matters in our own (frugal) hands and frosted grapes experimentally. Of course, we could have purchased pre-frosted artificial grapes, but what fun is that?

The grape motif came about after meeting with Nirbhika and Dinesh, a couple who wanted a Midsummer Night’s Dream wedding combined with a vineyard theme (more to blog later). Dinesh’s family owns and operates a winery, so grapes were obviously a natural accent.

Enter the grapes. Sometimes Kendra gives me strange looks when I decide that I want to do a project. I wouldn’t say it’s a look of scorn…well, maybe it is. It’s like trepidation with hints of doubt. Then I cajole her into riding the bandwagon and we’re convinced we can do it!

Ex. 1: Notice the perfection of frost? That’s because we purchased those from Stats…in the case our experiment didn’t work. We purchased these because we figured artificial grapes would last a whole lot longer in the June heat. Meet Model Grape.

Ex. 2: This was the first sample we created. Armed with a bevy of items, we first watered down some beige paint and bathed the grape in it only to find it to be too milky. Then we sprayed some “Pearly Dew” on it. With a name like Pearly Dew, you’d expect it to have a soft finish and glaze. Instead, we got a metallic, silvery finish. Punks! So to take it down a notch, I looked around the room to find that one thing to give it that dusty, just picked from the vine look. So I rolled it in some plaster. You know…like flour. You’ll notice it got clumpy. The only time I've ever seen a clumpy grape was at the bottom of my fruit drawer in my fridge.

Ex. 3: Sitting around and looking at Model Grape, I noticed that they were grapes of the red variety, and the “frost” I rubbed off of it had a pinkish red cast to it. Though we usually connect frost with a white color, it was really too bright to give it that filmy finish. I wondered if we used a light blue color on our sample grape (which was of a blue/purple variety) if that would work. I hunted around our studio and found some "Wedgewood Blue" spray paint (the kind florists use to tweak colors of flowers). So we found that our techniques may have been right, but we were using the wrong kinds of color.

We ended up watering down the beige paint concoction to give it a filmy, translucent finish when it dried. Then we lightly sprayed on the blue paint. Before it dried, we rubbed off some of the paint to blend it a bit. Maybe it wasn’t exactly the same as our sample, but nobody else could tell...right?

So this could be really obvious to some people, but by trial and error we’ve learned something new. If you want to frost an apple, use a pink spray, pears a white/sage green spray...plums a lavender or bluish spray, and so forth. So if you’ve googled “frosting grapes” or “how to frost artifical grapes” or “frosted grapes” or “frosting a grape but not for cakes” or any of the combination aforementioned, we hope this helped you solve your project dilemna.