I am so excited to post about my trip to Santa Barbara, California in January to join the Chapel Designers/Florabundance Design Days.  I am so honored to be a part of the Chapel Designers - a group of like-minded, dedicated, independent floral designers who come together to share skills, knowledge, and ideas about the wedding flower industry, and to support each other.   This is an amazingly talented (and fun!) professional group, and I was so honored to join in January.  

We had an amazing time at Sunstone Winery, designing with Chapel Designers founder Holly Chapple, Nancy Liu Chin, Joseph Massie, and Francoise Weeks.  Here's just a few images of two of the individual projects I made - a bouquet filled with textures, berries and branches and a fancy hair piece.  More images to come soon of the fabulous group projects we made when those are available!  A huge thanks you to Diana Marie Photography for these beautiful images and for capturing the whole workshop so beautifully!

Red Poppy is so thrilled to be a wedding florist featured in the new Borrowed & Blue Directory for Ann Arbor together with some amazing local vendors!  Borrowed & Blue focusses on locally inspired weddings and provides a truly great list of vendors that focus on Ann Arbor.  I really appreciate that Borrowed & Blue has a dedicated Ann Arbor collection of vendors - I think sometimes it can be confusing when vendor listings include all of metro Detroit - this makes it much easier to see a great listing of folks who work frequently in the Ann Arbor area, so I'll certainly be recommending this resource to my brides!  Thank you, Borrowed & Blue!

It's very busy with proposal writing around here!  And these bright cheery tulips are helping me think spring eventhough it's still pretty grey outside.  Only a few more months and  bright tulips will be popping up for real!  We planted 50 tulip bulbs at our house this past autumn, so can't wait to see them popping up all over!  

This was such a beautiful wedding, and one if my last of 2013!  The bride's bouquet had an elegant, seasonal, winter touch and beautiful textures featuring succulents, burgundy dahlias, and ivory roses.

The coordinating bridesmaids flowers featured silver brunia berries, burgundy carnations, lavender roses, and dusty miller foliage, finished with a burlap wrap.

Happy New Year!  I love the festive holiday season, for lots of reasons!, and I always look forward to going to the floral wholesaler with all kinds of foliages and textures and blooms that we don;t see the rest of the year.  Silver and gold gilded branches - check!  Wonderfully fragrant juniper with festive blue berries - check!  There's a lot of sniffing and touching and it's very much a kind in the candy store type experience.  

I'm so grateful to the warm and talented Melanie Reyes of Melanie Reyes Photography for entrusting me to create two arrangements as gifts, and also for photographing them for me so I can share these gorgeous images.  This is such a gift for me - thank you Melanie!

These arrangements featured gorgeous protea in several sizes and colors, cymbidium orchids, blue eryngium, lotus pods, burgundy peonies, hypericum berries, snowberry foliage

I am so, so excited to share this styled shoot at Cottonwood Barn this past autumn, with a vintage to vogue theme, reflecting Cottonwood's amazing renovation.  Cottonwood Barn is truly amazing and unique - it has the vintage feel of a loved and used barn, and its renovation is incredible.  The gorgeous chandelier in the main reception space is truly jaw-dropping (even for us wedding pros, we couldn't stop talking about it!), and everything has been finished beautifully and thoughtfully.   It's modern and practical in the right spaces (beautiful bride's suite with floor-length mirrors and adjacent to the modern ladies' room) and vintage and charming in the right ways, too (bar in a silo - how neat!).  I can't say enough about how impressed I was with Cottonwood! Melanie Reyes and Dayna Mae did such an AMAZING job capturing every thing, and it was a wonderful team of vendors lead by Luna Soiree, including a fabulous vintage ice cream truck by Hello Ice Cream!   Melanie captured all the highlights and vendors in a full blog here - I just wanted to post a few more of the flower photos here because there were so many I loved!  Thank you so much to everyone involved - so great to be a part of this!

What an incredible image!

There were a couple of different bouquets for this shoot, each featuring blush and peach tones with a few highlights of blue or purple and lush foliages and textures.  This bouquet featured  peach juliet garden roses, seeded eucalyptus, cafe au lait dahlias, lotus pods, blue viburnum berries, queen anne's lace and white avalanche roses.

The centerpieces for the shoot also included ornamental kale, larkspur and purple mathiola atop a gold-colored glass compote to compliment the gold candelabra.

Just a little holiday thank you arrangement featuring protea, cymbidium orchid, snapdragons, leucadendron, hypericum berries and festive foliages in a whitewashed wood box.  I hope this makes someone's day!

I am so grateful for these beautiful images from Heather Jowett - this was such a lovely wedding, wonderful families to work with, and it just makes me smile so much to post these images.  The ceremony was at beautiful St. Andrew's Episcopal Church and the reception at the lovely and historic Gandy Dancer in Ann Arbor.  Gorgeous hair and make-up by the talented ladies of Imagine Three.  It was a perfect autumn day for these two! Pure joy!  And I love these adorable handbags!

The wedding flowers were a bright jewel-toned palate that was both seasonal and sophisticated.  The bride's bouquet featured orange, burgundy and fuchsia dahlias (sourced locally), white ranunculus, blue anemone, peach juliet garden roses, blue viburnum berries and green viburnum opulus.

It's always so lovely working with the Gandy Dancer - lovely, elegant cake!

Here are the last wedding bouquets of 2013!  And we just got a perfect dusting of snow, just in time!  The bride's bouquet featured huge white polar star roses, burgundy dahlias, and green succulents.  The bridesmaids' flowers included silver brunia berries, lavender ocean song roses, dusty miller foliage and burgundy carnations.  Yes, bringing carnations back!  These were the perfect shade of burgundy and give it almost the soft look of a peony, but a fraction of the cost.  The right tones, used in the right way, carnations are winning me over!

Here's just a quick snap of this weekend's autumnal wedding bouquet!  I loved the colors and textures that this bride chose - seasonal and autumnal, but also sophisticated and creative - the bouquet featured a handmade paper flower made by a friend of the couple!  The bouquet also included burgundy dahlias, peach juliet garden roses, silver brunia, lavender ocean song roses, white matthiola, and alchemilla mollis.  It was a pleasure as always to work with Luna Soiree at Cobblestone Farm in Ann Arbor for this wedding!