Hey everyone! This is Alex, Holly’s eldest son. My mom is too busy to blog right now, so I’m doing it on her behalf. It has been a long day. It is almost 10 o’clock and my mom, the whole family, and five employees are still working. Earlier today my mom had nine employees here. We’re almost ready for our big Saturday.

This first picture is of my mom with Amy’s colorful bridal bouquet.

Here’s a picture of the walk-in cooler. When I first walked into the cooler today, I was almost knocked over by the rich perfume of roses. We could bottle and sell the air in here. The cooler is packed to the hilt, but there are even more arrangements and bouquets in the shop.

Here is the boutonniere and corsage crew. Robbie East (front left) is from Fields of Flowers. Jeanna (left back) and Holly (right back) are going to be starting their own flower business soon, so my mom let them work today to see how the floral machine works. And Jessie’s back is turned towards us, but I have another picture of her.

Here she is, creating a beautiful hydrangea center piece.

My mom insisted that I post this picture on her blog. This full bridal bouquet is sure to catch the eye; the hot pink roses contrast against the curling orange orchids.

That’s it for now. Tomorrow or Sunday my mom will put up new pictures of this weekends flowers, pictures taken on-site.

Time for our Friday night preview. We have lots of  goodies to share.

Maids of pink Peonies and Sophie pink Roses.  A bridal cascade of white Cymbidium Orchids and two shades of pink roses.

An absolutely to die for, all orange bridal bouquet.

Bouquets of all green will be delivered with the orange bridal.  Super yummy.

A blue bridal. Here is my brides something blue.

A sea of blue and lavender maids bouquets.

A white Peonie bridal bouquet, with beautiful white feathers.

Stunning centerpieces.

Tomorrow we will bind the bouquets with their satin ribbon and deliver them to four lucky brides.
Holly

Imagine these with a red bridesmaids dress and a popping  pink sash. The sash ties in the back and goes all the way to the floor.

Orchid Kiss, is the color of the maids dresses for this wedding. This combination is sure to please. We love all of the bright happy colors.  In fact the orchid in this bouquet is the exact color of  the dress color orchid kiss.

These centerpieces go to a more organic and natural wedding. The bride will marry on a lake at a Vineyard. Pink and brown with natural green elements are the color pallets for this pretty bride.  We will begin designing the bouquets later today.

These centerpieces match the Orchid Kiss wedding.

These blossoms are waiting to go to the party. We just have to turn them into elevated centerpieces for our red and hot pink bride.

This is going to be one beautiful wedding weekend.

Holly

It started like this, boxes, and boxes, of flowers arriving for this weeks Virginia Gold Cup Races.

The boxes and bundles were sorted per corp. customer. Our wedding flowers would arrive one day later giving us a chance to get the other flowers in water.

There were flowers everywhere…

and then we began to design.

and design…

and design!!!

Our shop is loaded with the most beautiful designs, red pieces, coral pieces, all white pieces, hot pink and orange pieces, blue and gold pieces, yellow pieces, white, black, and red pieces, white and silver pieces, purple and green pieces, hot pink and blue pieces, tropical pieces, cinco de mayo pieces, contemporary pieces, southwestern pieces, and let me tell you; this has been a PIECE of work!!!!

Getting all of the big designs in the cooler after we create them is mega hard, and the boys get to help with that. I think we have a total of 36 buffet designs that are this size or larger. We purposefully use this huge vase full of water to keep the designs weighted in case it’s a windy day!! When you have an outdoor event you have to be prepared for anything.

 

Congratulations to Whitney who designed her first buffet piece!!! We are all so proud of this designer girl!!!!

Wish us lots of luck tomorrow night, we have to get all of these flowers into vans at 2am because we have to be loaded up and on our way by 5am. We then have to get all of the flowers to the field at 6am and all tents must be decorated and ready for visitors at 10:00 am. GO TEAM CHAPPLE!!!

Big thanks also to Evan who spent the entire day draping fences and tent poles. He is awesome!! I am so proud of our entire team, everyone was awesome today and the energy was rocking in the shop. I hope we can keep it up for two more days!! One last thanks to the Chapel Designers who encourage and inspire me everyday. Thank you for believing in me!!!

Guess what, my friend Isha Foss is here and she was in my cooler!!! I am going to take the rest of this night off and hang with my sister flower girl friend!! I bet my other flower sisters are sooooo jealous!!!

So happy my precious babies are resting “in the cooler” it’s hotter than you know what, and that kinda hot, is simply not good for brides or flowers.  Those of us who live in the DC, Virginia area are in the middle of one of the strongest heat waves I can remember. Of course we are; we have four events scheduled to be outdoors. Luckily all of my brides have back- up plans and, my flowers have the cooler. The above photograph is of our pink and cream bridal bouquet.

This is the main view in the cooler right now. 18 vases of white callas lined up and ready to go to a big corporate party tomorrow. Having the weddings to deal with was simply not enough, so we added a little corporate into our life.

We have one bride doing red, green, and white.

One bride doing peach, coral, green and blue.

and another bride using purple and green. The purple and green bouquet is behind the callas so there is no picture of that tonight. In addition to all of our events tomorrow we provided amazing flowers today for an incredible rehearsal dinner. I left this event totally delighted and giddy. We brought in amazing flowers, potted herbs, lanterns, antiques, and lots of fun props.

Have a great night, I am off to bed!!!!

 

Our baby lion Grace. 

 

Hope you have a great Halloween. We actually do not have any spooky weddings, so we get the weekend off. Check out our last blog post for our very fun Halloween designs. Now for some mommy time. 

Here is a cute shot from two years ago. Abby will die when she sees this.

 

Love this picture also. The boys have really grown.

Holly

Our second day of class began with lots of pink, and lots of romance. Garden roses were provided in 6 different shades of pink. I spared no expense for my students, we had it all!!!

After a light breakfast and a heavy duty business meeting, I showed the students how I make my bridal bouquets. Once my design was complete, students had free range to choose the blossoms that they most desired.

Even the piles of flowers the students chose were beautiful.

While the ladies worked, my son Sam and our cat Marcie kept us entertained.

Once the bouquets were created they were bound with ribbon and placed in the cooler. Each design would be photographed at our big photo shoot and students will get the images for their portfolio.

Next we worked on compotes, hair pieces, corsages, bouts, and the BIGS. My friend Isha Foss (also a Chapel Designer) calls elevated pieces the Bigs. We call them elevators.

Designer Mary Coombs from A Garden Party designed back to back with me on these whopper designs.

Simply gorgeous pieces were created all day long. We rocked it out on this day.

Each design created on Tuesday had a purpose and a place in our big shoot.

One of my most favorite pieces of the week was Alicia’s compote. I think she plucked 30 persimmon’s from my tree.  Note she was also the designer that over stole the berries from my daddies house. This design was truly edible!!

On our final day together we set up a huge photo shoot thanks to photographer Genevieve Leiper.  The shoots were designed by using all of the flowers we had created throughout the week. We were able to create two totally different looks for Genevieve to photograph.

Many thanks to make up artist Deshae Mayrand who prepped our gorgeous models, Rachel Mackay and Andrew Dolan. A huge round of applause to Miriam from Soliloquy Bridal.  Miriam supplied amazing gowns for us to use. The fabulous linens, china, and glassware were provided by DC Rental. The images from this shoot will be stunning and they will be submitted for publication.

A huge thanks to Rachel Merkle of Miss Merkle Design, who spent Wednesday morning with the students discussing branding, websites, and social media.

Our students had the pleasure of staying at Lansdowne Resort, Idyll Time Farm, and Faith Like A Mustard Seed Farm. Our fabulous meals were catered by South Street Under, and they even baked us a gorgeous wedding cake for our shoot.

The designers from A Garden Party stayed at Idyll Time Farm. The cabin holds five people and it was so much fun to see this bed and breakfast located right here in my little village of Lucketts.

Designer Melissa Stewart stayed at Faith Like A Mustard Seed Farm which is operated by the Glaeser family. Guests got their own wing of the house with a kitchen, sitting room, and an upstairs bedroom.

Patricia Glaeser showed Melissa, Alicia, and I the farm.

Patricia was happy to show us her new walk in freezer. She has no idea how we florists can totally relate to her cooler joy!! We love our coolers.

I had a blast feeding the calves and playing with the babies.

Back in Patricia’s house we delighted in seeing her beautiful home and her eggs were mighty impressive as well.

This week was a complete and total success and it was fulfilling on so many levels.  I adored sharing and teaching and growing our Chapel Designers clan, that of course was no big surprise, we all know how I love that. My desire and need to help other designers is something I simply can’t resist doing. After 21 years of designing and creating weddings, my life has a new and exciting purpose. In addition to the teaching, I got to share our home and our family with our guests. Evan’s beautiful gardens were put to incredible use as well, not only did we cut from our gardens we were able to stage two gorgeous shoots here in our yard. In addition to that, I was able to contribute to tourism and as a past board member for the Dept. of Tourism for the County of Loudoun, this was an honor and clearly a new goal. To think that guests visited in Loudoun and stayed at 3 different facilities, dined on local foods and designed with Loudoun County flowers makes me really proud. I would like to thank Loudoun County employee Kellie Boles for helping me achieve this next level. It was Kellie who helped us change our business to an agricultural business so that I could begin to host workshops and sell our local flowers.

I am thankful, thankful, thankful, that things are growing and developing for our studio. One last thanks and shout out to designer Alicia Schwede. Alicia and I started our friendship about 5 years ago on twitter. We have designed together, in VA, California, and NYC. Having my friend here with me was wonderful. I am so grateful for the people we are meeting and falling in love with!! I have a whole new list of friends from this weeks adventure. This was awesome!!!

 

 

As you may have noticed I was missing in action last week. I was on a whirl wind tour that simply had me gone from my studio for several days. First I went to Chestertown Md. to meet with an upcoming client and then I headed to VA. Beach for some much needed time with my good friends the Chapel Designers. My trip to VA. Beach has been on the bucket list ever since I became friends with Chapel Designers Isha Foss, of Isha Foss Events, and Daevid Reed of Daevids of Norfolk. Much to my delight I found Chapel Designer, Trish Van De Merkt along the way. Our little road trip turned into quite the adventure. It was awesome to see the studios of both Isha and Daevid and my time with my friends was incredible.

One of the funnest moments was when Isha got behind the wheel of a huge box truck. Yes that girl can seriously drive!! Plus check out her pretty load. It took a box truck, a sprinter van, and several sports utility vehicles and cars to get all of Isha’s decor to her event. Isha put up over 2,000 yards of fabric for this event and seeing that install was simply mind boggling and beyond inspiring.

Trish and I spent a bit of time in the cooler last week and we loved every minute of it !!

Our time in Daevid’s studio was a bit overwhelming. I have never seen so many props and decor items. Seriously Daevid has better props then all of the decor companies in DC. His flower shop and design space takes up several floors and ranges from carousel horses to chandeliers. Oh and puppies, he has 3 sweet dogs. His cooler was also full of lots of pretty!!

Thankfully Trish and Daevid happened to be heading to Leesburg, which meant that I roped them into helping me with a secret mission photo shoot that I am doing today. Because of the big shoot, we spent all day today gathering beautiful blooms. Along the way we even found Chapel Designer Morgan of Petals and Hedges and Donna of First Dance Floral.

This is a photo of designer Morgan Walker and her delightful garden center. Many of the plants I have been planting on my property come from Morgans garden center Petals and Hedges.

After spending time with Morgan and enjoying her delicious garden center,  we headed to Green Stone Farm where we met with growers Barbara and Dennis. While there we bought buckets of beautiful blooms, we got poppies, snapdragons, ranunculus, sweet pea, eremurus, blue berries, and alium. We had a hay day at her farm!!!

This picture is of Lindsay and Barbara. Lindsay helps on the farm and does the designing for markets and CSA.

We had such a lovely time at Green Stone Farm and we were beyond excited to get home and design. But…

first we had to harvest all of the flowers at my house.

Here is the start to some of the pieces we are creating for our big photo shoot. So much has happened in the last five days I can’t even digest it all yet. One thing is for certain I sure love hanging with my Chapel Designer friends.

In addition to all of this, our studio designed an amazing wedding that was loaded in peony and viburnum from my garden. I would say the last five days have been very full. This week will also be super busy so I will be back with you as quickly as I can.

Because I have missed so many blog posts I have a good bit of catching up to do. Here are some of the fun things that are happening around here. Yesterday I hosted a wreath making class. The class was absolutely perfect in spite of being mighty small. I must remember to market my classes but I was super busy with my big secret project that had me out of the house all last week!!! So, luckily for me two wonderful ladies did sign up and because of them I got to spend a wonderful afternoon enjoying flowers, and as an extra benefit I now have a beautiful holiday wreath hanging on my red door.  It was truly a pleasure and a gift to spend time with both of these ladies doing something I love.

On Saturday we took our annual picture with Santa. My family sure is getting small. I cant believe only four kids were home for this photo. Let me also say, our really big man child was not totally into a visit with Santa.

Last Thursday and Friday I had the pleasure of having Chapel Designer Janet Martineau in my home. Of course I had to take an “in the cooler” photo. Janet owns Floral Verde.  She is such an amazing designer and I was thrilled to have her here.

Other fun things you should know, I am teaching in California. I am super excited about this workshop and I am hoping I will meet you in CA. Please check out the Florabundance website for more information. I am so honored and pleased to be working directly with Florabundance on this event. What a dream come true!!! This workshop also features my good friends Alicia and Chuck the editors of Flirty Fleurs

Also one of my favorite designers Ariella Chezar is teaching in Maui, be sure to check out Ariella’s site for more information.

So many wonderful things are happening here and don’t forget about our big trip to NYC with the Chapel Designers. Our trip to NYC is set for March 17th and you can read more about that here.

Happy day!!!