The Great $50 Wedding Centerpiece Challenge!

OK folks, here's what you've been waiting for! Our conversations with fellow florists and flower lovers bemoaning how wedding flowers depicted in magazines are unrealistically beyond the budget of the average bride, leads us to this, our first contest.

Here are the rules - get your game faces on!

The Great $50 Wedding Centerpiece Challenge

1. Centerpiece value must equal $50 retail, (US dollars) – including container and labor. You cannot claim the container to be a rental.
2. You must show your math. Retail price of all ingredients – flowers, container, greens, supplies like floral foam, ribbon, etc. – must be accounted for. No “free” product – if you “had” it, found it, grew it, or picked it by the side of the road, you must give it a realistic retail price.
3. You must show what percentage of the $50 price is for labor. No exceptions.
4. I reserve the right to toss out anything with questionable math.
5. 1 centerpiece submission per designer.
6. Centerpiece must be appropriate for a wedding.
7. Send only 1 photo of your submission, so pick the best one!
8. Husband says you should submit your photo as a JPEG, TIFF, or GIF, so I don’t have to learn anything new before Christmas.
9. Submit 1 photo,your itemized math, and your contact information to: sproutcontest at gmail dot com. Subject line should read - $50.
10. Submissions must be received by 6:00 pm Eastern Standard Time, December 20, 2009
11. Voting will run from December 21, 2009 – January 21, 2010. Winner will be announced January 22, 2010.
12. Winner will be blog reader’s choice.

There will be a prize, but I have not settled yet on what delightful item it will be!

Feel free to link this contest to your own blogs, web sites, Twitter, and Facebook accounts. I figure the more people who know about this and send submissions, the more exciting it will be!

Now, get designing!!!

Thanksgiving Centerpieces

Come the holidays, we get many requests for long and low centerpieces. Everyone wants something they can see over that fills out the middle of their dining room table. But once turkey and trimmings arrive, that long centerpiece starts to make the table stuffed!

This year, we'd like to remind you that a lovely European style round arrangement in a vase can be low enough to see over and still leave room for food! This is our most popular look all year round for centerpieces.

Pumpkin Pie: Warm and spicy, nothing says Thanksgiving like Pumpkin pie! Roses, berries, orchids, and other flowers in seasonal harvest tones.
Deluxe size shown - $90

Mashed Potatoes and Gravy: Yummy, earthy flavors in gold, cream, and caramel featuring roses, orchids, berries, and hydrangea.
Deluxe size shown - $90

Concord Grape: Juicy shades of plum and berry with a hint of frost. Seasonal flowers in coordinating shades along with roses, berries, and orchids.
Deluxe size shown - $90

Cranberry Sauce: Rich, deep shades of red and cranberry mingle for a look that lasts. A seasonal selection of blooms which includes berries, roses, and orchids.
Deluxe size shown - $90

We are offering these centerpieces in two sizes -

Deluxe, on the left. Approximately 14" wide by 13" tall. $90
Small, on the right. Approximately 11" wide by 10" tall. $50


Also consider - the Complete Thanksgiving Dinner! Order one arrangement in each style for a discount -

Deluxe Dinner - $320
Small Dinner - $180

You provide the turkey!

Why It's Worth Going to the Flower Market

I think seeing this odd fuzzy fruit from the Netherlands would be enough of a reason to go to the flower market!

The size of a kiwi fruit, but lighter and springy like a "koosh" type ball, you aren't going to run into this at the local wholesaler. Nor would this be an easy sell over the phone. So many florists just pick up a phone and call in their flower orders.

Now, I'm not saying I have an immediate need for these guys, but by going to the flower market you can stumble upon something wild and unexpected that can excite the imagination and unleash your creativity even if you never choose to buy it.

What about these mini watermelons on the vine? They're only about the size of grapes! These were also spotted last week next to the curcumis above. Both are part of the squash family.

Now the fruit while really cool, didn't entice me to buy them. Sometimes you have to think about what you would do with something this unusual. But earlier this year I snapped up this yellow and gray verbascum - loved the fuzzy linty stems with its winking yellow flowers!

This tiny silvery sea creature-like flower is edelweiss, yes like from The Sound of Music. "Small and white, clean and bright" - but is this what you pictured?!

I would never have bought these hellebores over the phone - "Hi, I have this pale translucent greenish lavender flower with 5 petals and speckles - do you want some?" Probably not, but when I see it, when you see it, then you become inspired to see how you can feature its delicate beauty.

A spring tulip that looks like fall leaves? Another hard sell, until you see it.

And what of this tropical flower? Looks like branch coral, doesn't it?! I've only seen it the one time and never again! If I didn't go to the flower market the week they had this, you and I would never have known about it. That would have been a shame.

The only way to find what is truly special and unique in the flower world is to go to the flower market. Makes getting up at 4:00 am worth while!

I'm a Celebrity Jewelry Designer!

The daughter of one of Husband's oldest friends is raising funds for her People To People ambassadorship by creating and selling jewelry and asked me to be a "celebrity" jewelry designer.

To see the work in progress click here and to learn more about Jess and the People To People program click here.

Jess and I hit it off over all things crafty a couple years ago, when we discovered our mutual talent for doing gimp! (I have many super secret summer camp craft skills thanks to four years of daycamp. If you need help with god's eyes, gimp, or macrame, I'm your girl!)

I have to say I was quite honored to be asked to collaborate with Jess on some jewelry designs and I hope she gets a big turnout at Shrewsbury's Oak Middle School's Holiday Shopping Night this Thursday, November 19th.

Autumn Bridal Bouquet

A couple quick shots of an autumn bridal bouquet - rich, classic fall tones of red, orange, gold, and rust. Seeded eucalyptus gave the bouquet some bounce and movement and tied in the sage green sash of the bride's gown to the bouquet.

Besides the ever popular dahlias, hypericum, callas, and roses, we also included a few unexpected touches like the rust amaranth and my fave, the yellow kangaroo paws. Bet you didn't expect to see those in bridal work!

The Great $50 Centerpiece Challenge!

I have not forgotten about my suggestion that we do a $50 centerpiece challenge and you all have not forgotten either!

Let's put our heads together and get some suggestions going about how this should go. I haven't done any kind of a contest before, so I'm open to suggestions.

I know of prime importance to me will be the "show your math" part. There needs to be some kind of accounting for the money spent, including labor. Do we want retail figures or wholesale?

What kind of time frame do we want to do this in? Get it done before the holidays or wait till after? How long should the contest be open for - a week, a month?

How to pick the winner - blog readers' choice? Do we need to engage an impartial judge?

I'm assuming wedding centerpieces, but do we want it to be any type of centerpiece?

A prize?! We should probably have a prize, right?!

Couple more thoughts - Can Sprout participate? Should there only be one entry per person?

And who knows Martha Stewart well enough to ask her to participate?!

Any other thoughts? Put them in the comments and we'll get this ball rolling!

Funeral Flowers

At Sprout, we probably don't do as many funeral flowers as other flower shops, because we're not as traditional as most of them. We're not the place you go to if you're looking for carnations and gladiolas. It's not so much that we're flower snobs, but that more traditional look just doesn't represent what we do well - there are plenty of other places to go to for that.

These recent pieces show you a little bit of our style. The top photo is of a casket cover and the lower photo is one of the pieces we did to go on either side of the casket.

We use a lot of tropical flowers at the shop, and I'm sure that makes some people think that we'll do something wacky and Hawaiian for a funeral, but if you look at the photos, you can see how we successfully integrated some tropicals like birds of paradise, anthurium, and orchids with more gardeny flowers such as roses, broom corn, and thistles.

(BTW we can certainly do an all tropical look too, but only if you specifically ask for it!)

A casket cover featuring red roses and delicate seasonal accent flowers like freesia, hypericum berries, thistles, and snapdragons.

Pair of side arrangements in bright fall tones with gerbera daisies, leucodendron, purple kale, roses, bells of Ireland, berries, and kangaroo paws.

Fall Party

We had an event last month in fall colors, naturally, this being New England and all! I love when the client gives me free rein - they usually get the best stuff out of me!

Since this was for our local public library, I wanted to wrap book pages around the vases, but I just couldn't bring myself to tear up a book! Trust me, I have tons of books I'm sure I'm never going to read again, but it just somehow seems wrong to trash something still readable. Now if I had a book that was falling apart or missing pages that would be another story.

Any how, found this great black and white printed paper that had a text-like design on it. Or maybe it's in some fabulously exotic foreign alphabet! Either way, it looked amazing wrapped around the cylinders and accented with ribbon.

I used grapevine balls as the support for the flowers which gave the arrangements a rustic-modern touch while being really functional structure-wise. I love finding a different way of using something!

My Big Fat Romanian Wedding Candle!

From time to time we are asked to decorate large candles for orthodox weddings and this is the most recent done for a Romanian wedding. Just a few 'Amnesia' roses, seeded eucalyptus, lemon leaves, satin ribbon all layered over a lime green net base. Would love to see how they work the candles into the ceremony!

Cirque du Noir II - 2009

Here a few not very good pictures from this year's Cirque du Noir event! I was so busy and didn't really concentrate much on taking photos, so please forgive the quality.

First a quick look at folks making stuff at our Cirque workshop - fun with 6 types of adhesive!

A sweet surprise - our "dark" candy bar set up at Bocado! Finding black candy that wasn't only all licorice and chocolate was a bit of a challenge.

Tina the tree lady rocks the gilded twig and spangled birch bark tiara and necklace she made at the workshop!

Another creative headpiece by a workshop attendee. :-)

And finally, my horribly blurry pic of the constantly moving Andreea wearing the leaf mohawk I created for her!

To see far better pictures than the ones I took, check out the following link at Festival Creative.

Sweet!

Sweet little floral arrangement my assistant Francoise made the other day in a client's narrow mouthed rectangular vase using orchids, freesia, leucodendron, mini callas and beargrass.

But the best bit that puts it over the top is the feather fern wrap in the vase!

Fall Wedding Classic

A white and pale green bridal bouquet featuring mini callas, hydrangea, ranunculus, dahlias, roses, and bunny grass.

My favorite part of this bouquet (besides the bunny grass!) is the personal touch on the handle. The bride's mother snuck me a piece of lace from her mother's wedding gown, so that would be from the bride's grandmother's gown. It was a piece cut from the "V" at the front of the bodice.

I tucked the cut edges under and held it in place with pearl headed pins. Mom wrote a note to her daughter, the bride, to explain the significance of the lace, which we presented to the bride with the bouquet. A few almost tears were quickly blinked away - no raccoon eyes! I love when something is that kind of personal, as a wedding should be.

Pretty fall maids in a row, packed to go!

The reception was at The International in Bolton MA. Glass cubes filled with fall colors in dahlias, large mums, orchids, berries, roses, yarrow, and amaryllis. I had a heck of a time getting those amaryllis open! Flowers can be temperamental and I bet those amaryllis were even prettier the next day. Getting the flowers to open and be at the peak of perfection is one of the many logistical challenges in planning flowers for an event, and the flowers don't always cooperate.

There were no lights on in the club and it was gloomy and misty in the wooded location that day, so these pics don't do the colors justice but I'm sure you can imagine the classic New England fall combo of red, orange, gold, and rust!

The Bride in Black - Halloween Wedding

We had a Halloween wedding last week, a first for me. Our bride was wearing black, along with the rest of the wedding party. She was pretty sure about what she wanted for flowers, black mini callas and green mums, but was a wee bit hesitant because she hadn't been able to see the two flowers together.

My dumb luck that I had both of those flowers in the day of her consultation! I had no idea that her dream bouquet was those specific flowers, so it was pretty cool that we were able to show them to her. A lot of people have trouble visualizing their flowers and it's tough for florists to have every possible combination in stock the day of your consultation, but if we know your color scheme in advance, we can try to have a few stems to show you.

Any how, 'Schwartswalder' mini callas with 'Anastasia' mums and a few black ti leaf loops to hide the ugly mum stems. Our bride definitely wanted to rock the Halloween, but without going too over the top and into camp. It's still a wedding after all and with Higgins Armory as the setting, it would have been easy to get carried away, but she reined in the high contrast color palette by only using two types of flowers.

Now I'm no photographer, and getting good pics of the black and lime green combo was not very easy, so I tried it on different background colors to see if dark was better than light. Not sure I'm crazy about either, but I share them both with you!

The maids continued the black and lime color scheme with the mums and the darkest purple Florigene carnations.

Notice how much more purple they look against the darker background.

Mini calla boutonnieres for all the men - the groom in black. We used grevillea and dusty miller foliages and a touch of purple and silver wire on the stems.

Green and purple dendrobium orchid corsages for the moms.

And yes - the black dress! I was really hoping to see my bride all dressed up, but at about 1 hour before show time, she had yet to arrive, so I hope she sends me some pics to share!

One Potato, Two Potato

Cleaned out our storefront planters today with the invaluable help of Husband (there was a lot of heavy lifting with hundreds of pounds of soil and gravel to keep the planters from being stolen), and found this fascinating sweet potato tuber!

I can't tell if it's one potato grown in a knot, or two potatoes grown around each other! We've been planting sweet potatoes for years out front and have never run into one that looked less like a potato.

You can say goodbye to two of our planters, as we trashed the ones that were destroyed by the ungrateful who live in my neighborhood. When planning your urban garden, I do not recommend zinc planters - far too crushable, and they become dangerous with the jagged metal edges vandals create.

Next year - fiberglass! And definitely more sweet potatoes!!