Love and Flowers

While many are still recovering from busy Christmas and New Years holidays, we here at Garden Party Flowers have been working like Christmas elves preparing for the one of the most romantic days of the year. After all, love is our business. Flowers and love go together like peas and carrots, peanut butter and jam, or rain and umbrellas! In our studio we have been busy creating new and interesting arrangements and bouquets to help you show your love and appreciation for that special someone in your life.

This classically inspired red rose and hydrangea arrangement is sure to make anyone’s heart skip a beat.

A deep and sensual arrangement of red roses and burgundy cymbidiums will inspire passion. You might even get a kiss!

Here is a naturally alluring arrangement made with soft hued garden roses, peachy spray roses, local peach roses, pink tulips and an accent of seeded eucalyptus. This arrangement is wild and romantic, feminine and sweet.

This planter may not look romantic at first, but why not think of it as a token of your love for that special man in your life. Traditionally, Valentine’s Day means the man buys his woman flowers and she in return may cook him a nice dinner in the nude. Well, why not challenge tradition? This time buy your man a unique lithops (living stone or pebble plant) planter and the he may just cook you a romantic dinner in the nude! This, my friends, is what dreams are made of!

Valentine’s Day is still a little over a month away, so there is still lots of time to decide on how to please (or find) that special someone! We will be (like good little elves) updating and adding to our Valentine’s Day Collection until the big day. If you do not see anything that makes you tingle give us a call, or stop by the studio to find exactly what you need to sweep your Valentine off of his or her feet!

TEDxVancouver Floral Arrangements

We had the wonderful opportunity to join, participate and get inspired with over a thousand bright minds for TEDxVancouver yesterday. The day was full of amazing, thought provoking and inspirational speakers. My favourite speakers were from Aaron Coret and Stephen Slen, Nolan Watson and Jer Thorp. Rick Chung of vancouverisawesome.com has a great blog post of the entire event, you can check it out here.

Not only did we have the privilege of attending the event, we also had the privilege of designing the floral decor. The theme for this year’s event was “THE FRONTIER” focusing on pushing boundaries through knowledge and innovation. With this in mind, we came up with the frontier inspired floral designs below.

We designed the arrangement in a sleek mirror container, inspired by a prototype aircraft. The structure of the arrangement gave it movement, as if the arrangement is moving fast, while the red ribbon ties the arrangement to the TEDx logo.

Here is a low quality picture during the lunch break of one of the arrangements at the registration table. Beautiful photo’s of the event can be seen on Jeremy Lim’s website.

VIFF Closing Gala

I promised a follow up to the post I did on the Vancouver International Film Festival Opening Gala, so here it is!  The Closing Gala was held in the historic Salt building, located in the Athelte’s Village in South East False Creek.  For those of you that don’t know, the Salt building is a significant and historic landmark for Vancouver, it’s located on the original shoreline of False Creek.  After being built in the early 1930′s as a refinery for raw salt, it was converted in the 1980′s to a paper recycling facility.  It sat empty for a number of years, until it was restored to it’s original glory prior to the 2010 Olympics.

If you’ve never been inside I highly recommend you go have a look, even if you just peek through the windows. It’s a big red barn like structure from the exterior with glass entrances at either end. The interior has a ceiling of exposed beams, dotted with sky lights. It’s just a big open space with minimal partitions (they have built in some washrooms though), great for holding parties, exhibits or as I said when I walked in, “Oh my god!  You could have a fantastic wedding in here!!” I’ve always loved the look of a bare bones structure like a barn all dressed up on the inside with elegant touches for a wedding.  There’s something about the contrast, it makes it seem so luxurious.

As you will see they really dressed up this space for the event, the theme was Arabian Nights!

Check out that ceiling!  So cool!  As you can see we chose deep, rich tones to reflect the sumptuous and decadent Arabian Nights theme.  We used dark pink lilies, mixed with red roses, red mokara orchids, and hot pink phalaenopsis orchids, along with a mix of burgundy and pink dahlias.  Additions like protea, curly willow and large tropical greens really ramped up the drama of the arrangements.

Big fluffy pink hydrangea are great to use in such large scale arrangements, they fill in a lot of space.  We also added some big bamboo sticks to raise the height and make them as grand as the space they were in.

As you can see it was a pretty extravagant evening.  The team from BLD decor was in there for hours before the event turning the big empty space into a lounge fit for an Arabian Prince and his harem!

And since I mentioned barn weddings earlier I thought I would share a photo of what I was talking about….

Come on…is that not GORGEOUS!!!???

Image via http://blog.thebecker.com

VIFF 2011 Opening Gala

We have the honour of being the Vancouver International Film Festival’s preferred florist!  This year VIFF is celebrating it’s 30th anniversary, so they chose the 1930′s as a theme for their opening gala.  So with images of old Hollywood in mind, we started to whip up a design for them reminiscent of this opulent and iconic time period.  Although a depression was looming and a war was waging, the 1930′s in Hollywood was all about glitz and glamour, silk and satin, and feathers…lots of feathers!

We set to work creating some large arrangements using white lilies, white hydrangea, snow berries, cream roses, palm fronds, and fluffy white marabou feathers.

For the larger arrangements we split them into 2 halves, making it easier to transport and to get up into the 6′ high planters they were to sit in!

The vases held water pearls and mini LED lights to illuminate the arrangements and add extra sparkle.

It’s all in the details…the crystals, the feathers and old black and white photos, along with live music, and old movies set in the 30′s projected onto a huge screen all came together to take guests back to the golden age of Hollywood.

The guests entered through a giant picture frame at the front door of the Rocky Mountaineer Station, stepping back in time.

The drinks were flowing and some great Vancouver restaurants including C, Nu, Joe Fortes, Goldfish, and Earls provided a sampling of their menus for the crowd to feast on.  My personal favourite was the gnocchi topped with creamy tomato sauce, burrata cheese and micro basil served up by Earls…it was divine!

I can’t wait to check out a few films featured in the festival that will be playing here in Vancouver over the next 2 weeks!  There are sure to be some great ones.

Check back for our post on our design for VIFF’s closing gala being held on Oct 14th.

OpenRoad Audi A7 Launch Party

Photo courtesy of OpenRoad Audi Facebook Page

Last night, we decorated the OpenRoad Audi Vancouver dealership with several beautiful floral arrangements for the launch of the new Audi A7. After taking a look at their facebook page pictures, the event looked like it was a success!

The inspiration for these arrangements came from the theme of the event, which was based around a “martini party” theme.

We had the perfect vases for this theme and designed the arrangement using elegant white hydrangea, green viburnum, beautiful creme roses and complimented by bear grass loops.

Take a look at this guy making an Audi A7 out of paper!

Vancouver Wedding Fair 2011

This year, our client Uniglobe Geo Travel asked us to design their enormous booth at the 32nd Annual Wedding Fair at the Westin Bayshore Hotel in downtown Vancouver.

For this design, we used elegant hydrangea, beautiful white roses, white dendrobium orchids, white cymbidium orchids and huge white lily’s.

After seeing all the booths at this year’s Wedding Fair, Vancouver brides have no shortage of beautiful venues, beautiful gowns and even a large selection of top quality florists.

Hopefully you will book a consultation and choose us!

To tie the beach destination wedding theme, we used starfish, sea shells and blue rocks at the base of the vase.

*UPDATE*

For day 2 of the wedding fair, we redesigned the flowers using beautiful white flowers, bear grass, green cymbidium orchids, dendrobium orchids and white lily’s. Check out the pictures below!

Vancouver International Film Festival Opening Gala Photos

If you’ve been following our blog for the past while, you’ve seen many floral centerpieces we’ve designed for our client the Vancouver International Film Centre.

Every event has a theme and so did last night’s big bash. The colour theme for the Opening Gala at the Rocky Mountaineer Station was this Van Gogh painting.

From this painting we designed an over 24 cocktail centerpieces using bright high and magic roses, sunflowers, dahlia’s and Chinese lanterns.

For the red carpet entrance, guests were greeted by a huge VIFF poster and elegant floral standards on each side.

After enjoying the view, the fresh scents and getting pictures taken, guests are then treated to a feast of food and drinks.

Fresh oysters from Joe Fortes

Wine from Wolf Blast and Beer from Stella Artois

You can check out the rest pictures in the slideshow below

Links and guides for this year’s Film Festival

http://www.viff.org/festival/

http://www.vancouversun.com/news/topic.html?t=Topic&q=viff2010

http://www.straight.com/viff

http://twitter.com/#!/search/%23VIFF

5 Step Flower Guide to Making Your Event Look Stunning

Our client Teldon Media Group presented The Canadian Tenors at the UBC Chan Centre last night and contacted us to make their VIP area beautiful.  Here is how we did it:

Step 1
Show your esteemed guests where to go to find your party with beautiful brightly coloured floral arrangements.

Step 2
Show your guests they’ve arrived by flanking them with the most elegant flowers

Step 3
Create a sense of discovery and anticipation by brightening dark area’s with giant white calla lily’s and floral balls hanging mid air.

Step 4
Surround your guests with fresh fragrant flowers as they mingle and snack.

Step 5
Keep the energy and “WOW” going with modern floral designs….and wine!

Read more about the reason why Teldon hosted this event and the cause they are supporting here.

Jaw dropping backdrop at the Vancouver Aquarium

One of the best parts of our job is going to and decorating at the most amazing venues. From Stanley Park, Cecil Green, Seasons in the park, Waterfront Hotel to the Brock House, we are constantly visiting the coolest places in Vancouver.

Last night, we decorated the Vancouver Aquarium and it was a blast!

We started off the day by decorating our Bride’s apartment at The Wall Centre.

The views were breathtaking.

While the bride and groom to be were having their ceremony, we began the fun task of making the Vancouver Aquarium gorgeous and elegant.

Congratulations to Tammy and Emilio!

July is flying by!

Jadie and Margaret from the Boucher Institute contacted us to design some beautiful and cheerful flowers for their graduation reception. It was really interesting to learn more about what the Boucher Institute is and what they do. They are Western Canada’s only accredited Naturopathic Medical School and they are located in New Westminster.

Their graduation reception was held at the Sheraton Wall Centre in downtown Vancouver. As per our usual way of doing things, we met Jadie, she told us the event details, her budget and then we delivered!

As you can see the event was a success!

Another special event we designed for this week was a benefit screening at the Vancity Theatre for The Chefs’ Table Society of BC.

Last night, Vancity Theatre movie goers got to sample delicious Italian fare prepared by Pino Posteraro of Cioppino’s Mediterranean Grill after a screening of “Big Night“.

To brighten up the room, Barbara from VIFF requested orange and yellow themed floral arrangements from us.