Planning your bridal bouquet

Visualizing your perfect bridal bouquet can sometimes be a process. Because the bouquet acts as an accessory to your dress, it’s important for your floral designer to not only see your dress, but to fully understand the style, colors, and scale of the flowers you want to be holding. Ideally, we would love to see an image of you in your dress during a fitting as well as any hair accessories, shoes or jewelry you may be wearing.

Having a visual of these details can play into what type of fabric goes around the bouquet handle and influence the pop of color added to the bouquet. You also may want to consider incorporating a family memento to attach to the bouquet handle, such as your grandmother’s brooch, your father’s heirloom pocket watch or the handkerchief your mother carried on her wedding day. These unique touches not only make your bouquet all your own, but honor the family member who passed them down to you. In addition, they might count as your “something borrowed” or perhaps “something blue.”

One very clear way of communicating the type of bridal bouquet you are looking for is to collect images of flowers that you love. I find that when a bride sends me three to five images of bouquets, there are themes that give me an idea of exactly what she is looking for. If you put several bouquet images on the same page, you will notice the similarities. Maybe they all have a lot of texture, or they are only use two to three types of flowers, or the flowers are all fluffy blooms. These images will help your floral designer understand what your personal combination of flowers may be.

Once we have sorted out which flowers you want in your bouquet, we begin to think about which flowers or colors you want to see the most of. Some brides want all bright colors and some want all soft whites and creams, with touches or pops of color. I have often found the design and colors will change from a little to a lot leading up to the big day. This is perfectly normal and not a problem. It’s common that when a bride is planning her flowers six months or a year in advance, things change! Maybe your bridesmaids dresses started out as a bright pink and now have become a dusty pink. Maybe your shoes were champagne and now they are bright red. These details will change some of the colors in your flower design. Not to worry; just keep your florist aware of these important changes so we can always stay on the same page!

See tips from our other professionals at our Brooklyn Betrothed site!

Pretty in pink summer wedding flowers.

I met this couple just a few weeks before their August 5th wedding in NYC. They were very excited to bring in some local Brooklyn people to collaborate on their wedding. The bride was so sweet and had no shame admitting that pink is her very very favorite color! The style we went for was sort of a mash of shappy chic meets the Hamptons. We used garden roses, jasmine, stephanotis, orchids, hydrangea, calla, tulips, and white and pink gomphrena and more.

Park Slope summer wedding at Benchmark.

This was a super important wedding me for SO many reasons, and there is kind of a crazy back story to go along with the series of events that fell into place. First of all, the bride totally found me on her own as she was searching for a local, brooklyn, designer. She contacted me about 3 months before her wedding at my beloved Benchmark. I say beloved because this was the first place I have an organic, grass fed steak in TWENTY years. It was absolutely delicious and did me good, as I am a recovering vegetarian! The bride and I got along naturally and easily as if we were already friends. I recommended members of my new group Brooklyn Betrothed . She ended up booking officiant Carissa Templeton, from our crew. They got along easily and naturally as hoped/expected.

The bride is a gardener and a total fan of herbs. We wanted to make this an important part of the floral designs and were able to incorporate this in almost every aspect. Her bouquet was filled with herbs including lavender, mint, sage, oregano and much much more. We hung test tubes stuffed with lavender, scabiosa pods, and lisianthus along the wall for an interesting, textural decor in the relaxed, casual, yet chic venue. The bride gave out potted herbs/plants to her guest as favors. We set these adorable little plants next to my vintage bird cage that was decorated with Juliette roses and jasmine.

By the end of her wedding, there were some crazy realizations! Her now husband was a childhood friend of a very close friend of mine. That close friend of mine was ALSO officiated by Carissa Templeton years ago and I was the florist! Carissa and I were working a wedding together 4 years ago and didn't even know it. Small small world (:

Brooklyn Botanic gardens summer wedding flowers.

This was my other July 23rd wedding that took place at one of my favorite places to work, the Brooklyn Botanic gardens. The bride was looking for a whimsical, funky, seasonal flowers using bright colors including cobalt blue, yellows, melons and white. Together we collected the cobalt blue vintage bottles to mix in with the vintage silver bud vases and my mercury bottle tea light holders. She also really wanted to have a natural touch being that we were in the BBG, so we incorporated a natural stump riser which is always a nice way to unite the collection of bottles. She wanted her bridal bouquet to be most sun flowers and her girls to have a seasonal mix as well as wild flowers. We used hydrangea, asters, thistle, crespedia, daisies, and greens. I loved working with this bride. She had a vision, yet, totally let me do my thing too. She was relaxed, happy and totally not worried about her flowers, which is always the best complement (: Enjoy!

Brooklyn Betrothed has launched!

The day has finally come for me to share a extraordinarily special endeavor with you all. A group of us Brooklyn gals have collaborated to form a one stop shop of talented local vendors for many of your wedding needs. Read how we all came together and what we have to share on our web site BROOKLYN BETROTHED. We had our launch celebration last night a wonderful restaurant called Benchmark .