Amazing Students Amazing Workshop

The private workshop held at our studio this past weekend started off with positive vibes before the class even started. Carley had contacted us several months ago to book a private workshop for her sister Jamie’s birthday.

During this workshop, we wanted to teach the sisters various container prepping strategies. We started off the private class with a west coast inspired tangerine themed floral arrangement.

Container Prepping Strategy 1: Chicken Wire

They quickly learned the techniques, listened attentively and designed beautiful arrangements.

Container Prepping Strategy 2: Tape Grid

The girls designed beautiful tropical arrangements after learning the tape grid strategy, our most commonly used method of prepping a container.

Container Prepping Strategy 3: Oasis Floral Foam

The last strategy taught was making a domey floral arrangement using floral foam.

Between designs, everyone got to enjoy yummy homemade macarons and almond cookies baked by Amy’s sister Annie. When she is not helping Garden Party Flowers bake desserts for our workshops, she works in the bakery department at T&T Supermarkets.

If this looks like fun to you, give us a call or email us to find out our next private workshop availability.

We will have more public classes scheduled in the new year. Thanks for being such amazing students Jamie and Carley!

Woodsy Inspiration – When Ranunculus Meets Plum Blossoms

Where does my inspiration coming from?
Thinking outside the flower box! When ideas come, draw them down and create them!

Tossing and turning, I couldn’t fall asleep! New ideas always kick in when I am calm and still – usually it’s my beauty sleep time. Insomnia may bring lots of stress to most people, but not for me. I feel good when creative ideas are flowing, swirling, and collaborating in my brain. Then I will get off my bed and draw them down with extra excitement! I know it’s passion and determination!

The first design idea was triggered by one of the photo frames on my desk. I wanted to build a garden photo frame to capture the beauty of ranunculus and the movement of the plum blossom.

The second Idea is winter. It has been snowing for the last two nights and I am just feeling white birch! I built this birch container using my trusty hot glue gun.

Before and After

Love love love the garden roses, haworthia, dusty millers, and hellebores.

Can’t wait to work tomorrow!!!! I meant today! It’s 4AM!

Our New Space – Our New Workshop

Posy Workshop

People with their posies

Wreath work shop

How To Make a Stunning Holiday Wreath in 4 Easy Steps

Enjoy this super easy video of Amy teaching you how to make a Christmas Evergreen wreath.  Follow these steps and you’ll have your own beautiful and fragrant wreath made in under 20 minutes!

What you need
Evergreens (Noble Fir, Silver Fir, Cedar and Blueberry Juniper)
Wreath Ring
Wired Twine

Live in Vancouver and interested in taking a wreath making class?

Boutonniere Showcase – Say Goodbye to Red Roses and Baby’s Breath!

It is for certain brides will always get stunning bouquets and beautiful dresses for their wedding. But it is important for men to wear matching and stunning boutonnieres as well! Traditionally, the boutonnieres are worn with formal attire for important occasions, while carnations and roses are always the typical choices. But don’t you just find they too big and the head is always bent over like it is bowing to your guests?!

In our experience, 95% of our grooms actually want a more masculine boutonniere and they want to pick out their flowers just like 100% of our brides do! Check out our boutonniere collection for more inspiration!  Make your groom proud of what he is wearing!

Black theme: unique black pepper boutonnieres with burlap. It’s very popular to make boutonnieres with blue berries, grapes, and black calla lilies.

Blue and silver theme: The thistle boutonniere is definitely better than any blue dyed flowers! Blue hydrangea blossom or blue delphinium works well too.

White and green theme: tuberoses and cymbidium boutonnieres are very unique. Men appreciate details such as the stitching around a Porsche shift knob. We love details also, see the attention to detail of this lily grass wrapped stem.

Other ideas: Mini roses, succulents, and dusty miller are also great flowers to use for boutonnieres.

Behind the Scenes-Auction Day!

Being a florsit is an interesting job, because the product you work with literally changes twice a week. The flowers we work with change seasonally and there are always new and interesting things we have never heard of! Getting new flowers twice a week is very exciting, because every auction day is like Christmas Day! On auction days we patiently await the fresh, new flowers and scream like little school girls when they finally arrive.

Our delivery driver, Yue, usually picks up the flowers with our speedy delivery van, but on really busy days the delivery is arranged by the people working at the auction.

This is why we get so excited! Buckets of beautiful fresh flowers to work with! Whenever we get flowers, ideas for arrangements rush through our heads. What fresh things can we combine together to make something original? What colours look good together this week? What is that?

Auction days always keep us busy. We have to separate all flowers, clean off the excess foliage and give each one a fresh cut, finally putting them in glass or ceramic containers with clean water. We then organize them in the cooler so they can be easily accessed when make our arrangements. It is very satisfying to process all of the new flowers and fill up the cooler with fresh product. And we do this twice a week (or more if there are weddings or large events)!

As they say, this is how the magic happens…at least one part of the magic. Auction days are great because everyone works together, chatting and drinking tea while we cut and trim our new flowers. Later these flowers will become part of an arrangement that brightens someone’s day!

DIY Boutonniere – Purple Delphinium

Everyday we are designing boutonnières for a variety of occasions such as weddings, graduations, retirement parties, and proms.

Lavender and especially PURPLE have been a very popular wedding colour theme. However, there are not many purple flowers.

Today, we would like to demostrate how to make a chic, modern, and summery boutonniere out of blue delphinium flowers which compliment the purple wedding theme.

Step one:

Pick the perfect bloom. The one that just blossoms and has no spots nor broken petals on them.

Step two:

Pierce the stems with a floral wire and bend it half.

Step 3:

Waterwrap the bottom stem of the flower with a piece of thin wet paper towel. Please make sure it’s not too thin nor too wet that it drips.

Step 4:

Start to tape the stems from the very top. Using the twist, turn, and pull strategy.

Step 5:

Pierce a dusty miller and band the wire. Get ready for taping!

Step 6:

Water package the bottom of the stem as well.

Step 7:

Tape the dusty miller from the top of the stem. Using the Twist, Turn, and Pull stategy to finish taping until the end of the wire.

Step 8:

Take a stem of Lavender and dusty miller, then place them nicely together. Wrap them all together tightly.

Many florists stop the design right here, but not Garden Party Flowers! We have few more steps to go to make our boutonniere different and unique!

Step 9:

Find a way to hide the green tape.
One suggestion is to cut a piece of green horsetail about 2″ long to cover the taping wire.

Step 10:

Snip off the end of the extra wires

Step 11:

Take a good picture of your boutonniere and share with everyone!!!

Now it’s your turn! Get your tools, find your ingredients, and learn a new skill to make your day more interesting and fun!

Please post a picture of your DIY boutonniere to our Facebook Wall and have a chance to win a $10 Starbucks gift card!

Think Outside the Box-Bold Colour Combinations!

Here at Garden Party Flowers, we always strive to try new things. At our shop the goal is to be ahead of the trends! While the style of our arrangements or bouquets are very bold, one of the things I realized is that sometimes our colour choices can be a bit, well, predictable. When dealing with flowers you are provided with many different hues, both bright and soft. As an art student I learned that colour is very important. Colour can set a mood or make a statement. Colour preference is often the very first question I ask a customer who is ordering flowers for someone they care about. For example, when a customer requests a graduation or birthday bouquet I tend to suggest bright colours like fuchsia, yellow, orange or red. These colours tend to be happy and loud, and will make a unforgettable statement when they are delivered to the recipient. When dealing with sympathy arrangements, most clients want the flowers to be comforting and elegant. I tend to suggest whites and greens, or perhaps a nice deep burgundy. These flowers will not overwhelm the recipient who is grieving the loss of a loved one.

While all of these general rules are good, it left me wanting to experiment with more than the typical colour combinations. In our shop, the most freedom in design comes when we create our weekly corporates. We must ensure to be giving our clients something different each week, and that can be a bit of challenge! Our corporate clients require flowers that are often needed to bring life into their office space. I started one week with the colours orange, cream and grey. I chose bright orange roses, cream tulips and paired them with some dusty miller and eucalyptus. The result was wonderful! They grey and cream were very sophisticated and really enhanced the orange roses to make them look brighter than they actually were. So began my experimentation with colours…

When choosing your own colours, there are many choices. I try to encourage customers to think outside of the box. While experimenting with colour there are a few important things to keep in mind. If you choose flowers of many different colours, you want to stick within a similar tone. For example, when choosing pink, yellow and orange, you would want all of these colours to be bright and intense, or all soft and cool. Mixing bright and soft tones of different colours may look a bit strange. When creating a monotone bouquet, different tones are actually good! It gives an arrangement more depth, as bright tones tend to jump out while softer colours sink down. This little trick will keep your eye moving around the arrangement, so you notice each individual flower. Also, keeping things simple is always a good rule to follow. You do not want to mix too many different colours in one arrangement or bouquet. Too many colours will make a bouquet or arrangement look very busy and confusing to the eye. When creating a bouquet try to stick to three colours at the most, but you can do more if some of the colours are very similar. For example, a coral, peach, yellow, orange and blue bouquet will still look lovely because the coral, yellow and peach are very similar. The small touch of blue will also really enahnce the other colours in the bouquet. I also really enjoy the purple and yellow combination for spring. On the colour wheel purple and yellow are opposite each other, which means they are complimentary colours. Complimentary colours naturally enhance each other, so the purple will seem more purple, and the yellow will also appear more intense! I found purple and yellow growing along side each other in many flower beds and thought it made quite an impact! Other complimentary colours include green and red, and also orange and blue. I have a colour wheel at the shop to help me see what colours will look nice together.

Colour means a lot when it comes to floral design. The colours you choose for your bouquet or arrangement can help to make the statement you want to make with your flowers. Certain colours will have different meanings to different people, and it is important to take this in to consideration as well. What ever colours you choose, take a moment to really think about what colour means to you and the recipient of the flowers! What ever you choose, have fun and be bold!

More interesting combinations to choose from:

deep purple and red

blue and yellow

yellow and purple

orange and pink

orange, white and grey

How to make a carnation pomander ball

We are taking the ordinary carnation out for a wedding and trying to make it shine like Cinderella!

If we do the magic right, carnations can be quite beautiful. We usually suggest carnations for flower girl decor or hanging balls from the ceiling or a tree.

Ingredients:

• 3 bunches of carnation spray
• 1 oasis foam ball
• 1 wire
• 1 pair of clipers
• 1 piece of ribbon 12″ long
• 1 pieces of woody stem 0 .5″

Step1:

After soaking the oasis ball in water until it changes to a deeper hue of green, cut a piece of stem to 0.5″ long.

Step 2: Tie a piece of wire onto the stem securely

Step 3: String the wire through the center of the foam ball and make a secure knot

Step 4: String the ribbon through the wire knot and make a secure ribbon knot

Step 5: Start adding carnation until the whole sphere is fill with carnation evenly.

Voila! Here’s the cute pomander ball! You can also mix some mini roses to make the design even more interesting!

Design by Amy J.S. Hu

Photo by Lisa Ujimoto

Botanical Illustration II

Well I am a little behind on my blog postings. The shop has been a little busy! So anyway, after learning the basics and history behind botanical illustration, I was ready to start. I choose to work with a lovely pink protea. When doing the original drawings the key is to find a basic contour of the flower and fill in the details afterwards. Drawing with this much detail is much like meditation, it was so easy to get lost in the structure of the flower. I focused my first drawings on the curling leaves of the protea. I began to notice all of these details I had not noticed before, like the bright orange trim of the yellowish green leaves. As the contour of my drawing became clearer, I began to fill in the shadows. Shadows are very important, as they give the image depth and realism. It is amazing how lines and shadows come together to create an image, I am always amazed at that!

After getting a completed drawing, it must be traced and transferred over to your crisp, white watercolour paper…This is a tedious task indeed! Tracing only the contours of your drawing, you then transfer the lines to your watercolour paper, and keep you original drawings for later reference. It is almost time to dip in to your paint, to practice mixing the colours you will need for your final piece. Believe me, finding the correct hue of green is not as easy as you think. Finding your colours is an important step, and should not be overlooked. Stay tuned for more!