We had a whirlwind weekend last weekend, and we have lost a day this week with the holiday. I am a little behind on my posts, but here are a few sneak previews. I will work on getting you better images in the next few days. Lets just say we had some technical difficulties with my camera–meaning it failed me miserably. These shots are from my phone.

 

These were our amazing creations at the Hay Adams Hotel in DC. 22 red Carnation balls suspended from the tent ceiling.  What a mega whopper this one was. I'm hoping for the professional images very soon.  Please note that the ribbons were cut clean, and you did not see all of that ribbon.

 

In addition to all of the designers, I enlisted several of my teenage daughter's friends to help do the holding and hanging. You need young blood on this kind of a job. I myself fell off of a chair and look like an abuse victim. I am a really great designer, but I am extremely clumsy. Those folding chairs collapse when you stand on the seat. Not smart.

 

The place card design: simple, elegant, and very chic.

 

The ceremony actually took place at the Decatur House. The Decatur is right down the street from the Hay Adams. Guests could walk from the wedding to the reception at the Hay.

More pictures coming later today.

Holly

Every year on the first day of school, I make my kids line up in front of the red door for a photograph. The last couple of years, the photograph has become more difficult. We started having babies again, and now we have to wake them up for the photo. This is Grace's first year in the photo, and she clearly has no clue what is going on.

I always dread this time of year. I love having the kids home for the summer.  I wish they could stay home everyday. I don't say this because I am Supermom. I really like the energy when they are in the house. In truth, school just brings a lot more work and responsibility and a kind of discipline we don't like to live by.

 

I just love the baby bed head. The teenage girls would never allow that to happen. Riley simple does not care about hair at all.

 

We also celebrated Hannah's sweet sixteen last night.

 

We are so proud of Hannah. It seems impossible that she is 16 years old.

We have lots of pictures from last week's weddings, and we will post them ASAP.

Holly

Our wonderful couple, Lori and Danny, made the cover section of a DC newspaper. You can see the story here. This is a beautiful article, and I am sure you will enjoy reading about them. The DC newspaper neglected to mention that we were the florist. We still think this is a big deal, and we are happy to report that we were indeed the florist on this wedding. 

My son Alex is always accusing me of saying that I love everything, but I can assure you that I don't love this newspaper right now. It was an extra nice slap because I am one of their customers, and this little insult was delivered to my front door. Happy Sunday morning for me. Every vendor was mentioned but the florist; I am not quite sure how this happened, but I do know the flowers were gorgeous. So beautiful, in fact, that they featured several close up photographs of the flowers. We labored over them for days and feel they are as noteworthy as the cake, the photography, the venue, the event planner and the caterer, who were all mentioned in the article.

So, right now, I do not love the newspaper who shall remain nameless. I do still love my bride and groom, the event planner Jennifer Arrezzo who brought me in on the job, Steve Canning for getting me these images and Don for his fabulous Dahlia's.  

I think the flowers are every bit as important as all the other parts of the wedding day. Is it true or am I just partial to my craft? I would love to see some comments about this.

Holly

In addition to the many hours we spend planning the flowers with the bride and the actual designing of the flowers, we have countless hours that we spend writing recipes.

My son is always scolding me about my blog because I love everything: I love my brides, I love my flowers, I love my kids, I love my bouquets, I love, love, love everything. Not true; I actually hate calculating how many stems I will need for each wedding. This is not to be confused with the part I love, which is writing the individual recipe. I close my eyes and imagine holding my brides requested flowers for her big day. I actually design the bouquet in my head: we will need 9 of this, 12 of that , what about this, let's give her some of that and so on. I then move on down the line: the maids will need 7 of this, 5 of that, and then I have to multiply each item by the amount of maids I have. Every single item has a recipe.  The recipes then have to be consolidated into one big flower request. If we miss one line item, the count is off and everyone is in trouble.

  The recipes usually end up looking like a paper that your English teacher graded. Everything gets crossed out and added to or deleted, depending on the final amounts you need.  In addition to the totals, you have to figure out the smartest way to buy. Some flowers come to me in bunches of 10, some are in bundles of 25 or 50 and some flowers you purchase by the stem. It really is beyond complicated.  I do love my brides, I do love my designs, so I have to struggle through this heinous job every week. We order the flowers for each wedding a week or two weeks in advance.  In truth, if we could do it earlier, it would be better. This is where those dreaded RSVP's come into play. Guest counts even affect the florist. My poor brides are often unsure of their guest counts all the way up to the end, leaving us questioning how many center pieces we need to make.

So I don't love everything, but I do love a lot. Here are some pictures from the flower shop this week, and guess what: I love them.

Don's Dahlias, I love them.

Loved this piece for Tuskies Restaurant; this is for their weekly flower delivery.

Fiddle Head Fern, we really love these.

Love this picture of my girls Debbie and Louise. They are amazing.

Love the color. Love the shape.

An amazing specimen brought in by one of the designers. I have never seen anything like this. And I love it.

Holly

I just wanted to share that we reached 100 reviews with Wedding Wire this week. 100 awesome and incredible reviews for Holly Chapple Flowers can be found here.  I love the Wedding Wire program and believe it is a priceless resource for brides.  Wedding Wire allows brides to share reviews on wedding vendors in their particular area.  If you are a bride and not using Wedding Wire, it is time you found this fabulous wedding planning tool. 

Please also check out the Wedding Aces program. This is the Wedding Wire blog, and I am a guest blogger for WeddingWire Aces. On the Wedding Aces blog you have the advice of every type of wedding vendor you will need to plan an event.  Get ready to have some fun. Wedding planning is way less stressful with the help of Wedding Wire.

Thanks to all of my brides who made a review; your kind words are such an incredible gift to me. I love reading my reviews and am so grateful I am making all of you so happy. Keep those reviews coming. We love them, seriously.

Here are a few pictures from designs we created today. We are loving the way this week is turning out.

Holly

It is Wednesday, and this is our big flower delivery day. Everything on this truck belongs to Holly Chapple Flowers, and this is a mega load. We will be busy for hours processing the flowers.  When all of our little beauties are in the water, we start to get vases ready. Once the flowers have gotten a little drink, we start to design. We have a very busy day ahead of us.

The boxes are labeled with each brides name, so that we can keep them sorted. Each bride has a section in the flower shop for her flowers. We never steal flowers from the wrong section. This would destroy our count or our recipes.

We have pages and pages of invoices. We must go over each line item to make sure we received the stem amount we requested. This, quite frankly, drives us crazy.

Flower delivery day is like having Christmas every week; look at all of those presents to open.

Holly

We had the pleasure of designing Becky and Sal's wedding flowers this past weekend at the Thomas Birkby House.  Designer Debbie, Sam and a crew of worker bees hit the Thomas Birkby House,while Jessie and I handled our DC bride.  We are clearly going to need to buy another camera if we keep this up.  The photographs I have to share are a mix of several different cameras, and unfortunately we did not get photos of everything. Hopefully you will get an idea of how perfectly we decorated the Birkby. In fact, this may have been one of our most beautiful yet.

We created a large arrangement that was placed under the arbor. This piece doubled as the buffet piece. Tuskies handled all of the catering and did an amazing job.

We created 6 white carnation pomanders. These hung from shepherds hooks to decorate the aisle. We also sprinkled petals all the way down the aisle, next to the chairs and under the kissing balls.

We decorated this wagon with roses and ribbon. This was used to bring down the flower girl.

The tent looked absolutely decadent. We did a total of 12 elevated designs. 6 pieces were airy and wispy and 6 designs were a tight clean mound of hot pink hydrangea.  We elevated the pieces on my new Clarinet vases. These vessels are show stoppers.

We used hot pink roses, medium pink roses, pink coxcomb, green mums, green hydrangea, green hanging amaranthus, green carnations, pink larkspur, and pink orchids to create the taller designs. The tight ball designs were created with over 20 stems of pink hydrangea. In fact, we tinted the hydrangea to get it that dark bright pink. We also used pink roses, green spider mums, green hydrangea and coxcomb in these designs with the same hanging amaranthus.

After I finished in DC, I came by to see my bride and groom.  I was able to get these photographs of everyone enjoying the night. This was a fabulous wedding, and I look forward to getting more photographs from the day.

 

We truly had another remarkable weekend at Holly Chapple Flowers Ltd.  Wait until you see what we do this weekend. We are headed for another unbelievable weekend.

Holly

On Saturday, we had the pleasure of helping Kelly and Ethan with their wedding flowers.  Kelly had a girl friend that had read about us, Holly Chapple Flowers, in Daily Candy DC. We were so honored to make this trip into the city. Kelly's wedding took place at the fabulous Fairmont Hotel in DC.  Evan and I actually spent our 20th wedding anniversary in this amazing hotel.  Everything about the Fairmont is perfect for a DC destination wedding.

The Hotel surrounds an amazing courtyard. The Colonnade room is one of the main ballrooms for events. Its walls of glass overlook this beautiful garden. The hotel is within walking distance of Georgetown, offering out of town guests lots to see and do during the weekend's festivities. Everything about the Fairmont is a magical fit for a wedding. This is an extraordinary hotel, in an extraordinary city, with extraordinary service. We worked with the Director of Catering, Bob Mikolitch, on this event. Bob is one more extraordinary point for the Fairmont. I loved working with him and his whole staff. Honestly, I do think you can judge a venue or any business by their employees. Happy faces abound everywhere at the Fairmont.

 

Kelly carried a bouquet of Black Magic Roses, red Freedom Roses, Black Baccara Roses and deep red Dahlia's from my local grower, Don.  We created bouquets of all white mini calla lily for the maids. We added a collar of Dusty Miller to add a hint of the silver to the bouquets. Silver was our accent color for the day.

Here is Designer Jessie, laying the aisle runner. We honestly avoid this task whenever possible; I am terrified of someone falling on a runner. But placing them indoors and on carpet is far less dangerous and actually does add a lot to the finished look of the ceremony. Just so you know, I crawled along the floor with Jessie to lay the runner.

We tied clusters of red roses and carnations on to the rows reserved for family. We placed several of the centerpieces on a table at the ceremony to create an altar. This eliminated the need for large altar pieces. In truth, I think the effect was totally stunning.

We used silver wire mixed in with the Callas to continue our silver accents. We also used thin silver thread to tie each red bouquet together. Kelly's mom made this lovely silver runner.

The Colonnade room has a beautiful pergola in the center of the room.  Ceremonies often take place in this space. After the ceremony, this becomes the dance floor. On this particular event, we needed to stay until after the ceremony. The centerpieces needed to be placed, and the runner needed to be removed.  As we left the ballroom to wait, we found these sweet little doves. 

After the ceremony everyone met in the courtyard for the releasing of the doves.

I am literally hiding behind a bush to get these shots. Kelly had given me permission to take any photographs that I could while we waited throughout the day. I really got lucky with these pictures. I was so close to the activity that I could not get the groom in the photo as well.

After Kelly and Ethan released their doves, others flew from the box to circle the courtyard. The white blur in the next picture is another of the flock taking flight.

I loved seeing this part of the day. You can tell from the photographs that the guests enjoyed this treat as well.

Here is a really sweet photo of the flower girl just before we moved the flowers onto the tables.

The guest tables either had a high centerpiece of white callas or a low of three very rich centerpieces. We did clusters of red dahlia's, red roses and red carnations. The effect was very dramatic.

This piece was for the place card table. The red dahlias are just fabulous.

 

In fact, we need to give yet another extraordinary point to the Fairmont for the wedding cake. This incredible wedding cake was baked by their in house pastry chef, Karen. She was so proud of her work. I knew instantly upon seeing the cake that she had copied the detail from Kelly's wedding dress. 

I guess that is the end of this wedding post, or the icing on a very perfect cake.  Happy married life, Kelly and Ethan. I was honored to work on your wedding.

Holly

I really do not want to brag, but I just can't seem to help myself. We kicked you know what today. We straddled Virginia and DC today, with a total of 3 weddings and one very awesome party. I will have lots to post over the next few days. It is killing me not to create one very large post that goes on forever.  I will restrain myself and start very slowly with our birthday party flowers. We loved these designs. They were created with green Hydrangea, blue Delphinium, orange Spray Roses, green button Mums, Don's orange Dahlia's and Thistle.

To make our designs extra sexy we added a brown vine that we are in love with.  The vine is called Angel vine. We have been through one huge box already, with 2 more on the way. We inserted the vine into the pieces to add a little something unexpected.

The customer for this order is the Volunteer Coordinator for Loudoun Interfaith Relief  She found our flowers last spring at their annual charity function.  I have been donating flowers to Loudoun Interfaith every spring. I love being involved in something so meaningful. Loudoun Interfaith is an amazing organization, this family and business fully believes in community service.  I am so honored I got to create these very unique designs. The party took place in the wine cellar at Tuskies in Leesburg.  

 

These pieces certainly got us off to a great start. I loved them, In fact I loved the whole day. I am very happy, thrilled and elated. We did incredible work today.

Holly

My bride Christina, just sent over these wonderful pictures of her wedding day. The reception took place at the Thomas Birkby House in downtown Leesburg.

I love providing mini Dendrobium Orchids for the brides hair. The size of the individual Orchids, make it perfect for this use. We give the bride multiple little blossoms, and then let her decide how many to use. This is fun for the hair stylist as well. One very large blossom seems to not work as well. When brides like the look of just one large flower, they can cluster all of the little blossoms together. This is the perfect way to keep the proportions correct from bride to bride, hair style to hair style. Every brides hairdo is different.

For brides who would like to use the maids bouquets as centerpieces, these pictures show how perfectly the bouquets can double as centerpieces. Bouquets that will become centerpieces must be substantial in size. The bride used her bouquet as well for the sweetheart table.

I loved the look of this wedding, and I loved this bride.

Holly