Beautiful Blooms

This year is Beautiful Blooms, LLC’s  second year participating in the Philadelphia International Flower Show. Last year our exhibit “Sunrise” won Philadelphia Flower Show’s “Award of Excellence”  and also an Honor from the Society of American Florists for “Artistic Presentation of Flowers and Plants for Public Enjoyment at the Philadelphia Flower Show”.  Shown below is a photo of last year’s display.

Global Terrain is the title of our Exhibit this year  and it was designed around Maya’s conceptual idea and inspiration of a topographical map. I fell in love with the idea when Maya presented it to me. After we had the initial design in place the whole Beautiful Blooms team got involved in development, flower selection and execution.  We take a team approach to our business on a daily basis and the Flower Show was no different. Beautiful Bloom has a select group of very talented people in house and everyone has something to bring to the table and it shows in our design.

The first piece of the design that had to be worked out was whether to create a standing structure or a suspended structure.  We had to weigh the different cost options. Either we built the piece to stand alone and have the union put it together or  we hang the piece and incur even more  costs of union labor for the longer amount of time for the installation. In the end we went with visually what we felt worked best and that was a 400lb steel structure created by our good friend Chris Kaienenberg at Wish Painting and Sculpture. The structure has 10 rigging points from the ceiling and is suspended 10 feet above the ground.

After we choose the structure we then had to decide how many vases to hang from it to create “Global Terrain.”  Maya created a colored grid to show how the color changes would occur and go from water to sand to dunes to grass to trees to rock to snow. The grid gave us a good idea of how many vases and flowers per area were needed to execute the design. and how much wire we would need to actually execute our idea.

This vase was the main supply for our exhibit and we used over 543 of them to create the topography design. These vases are currently available at the Beautiful Blooms Boutique 

In addition to the quantity of items needed we had to figure out the spacing per vase on the structure no vases knocked into each other with the slightest bit of wind. In addition, we figured there would be about 547 vases that needed to be hung and each vase filled with water and flowers would weigh approximately 1-1 1/2lbs.  With this in mind, we had to make sure that when the structure was hung it could support all of the weight (over 1,000lbs) hence the 10 points for rigging.  Each vase was hung from wire and an s-hook to hold each vase. We’d like to send out a special thank you to our friend Ben down at Metro Hardware (624 North Front Street, Philadelphia, PA 19123-3102 (215) 238-0600.)  Not only did he get over 500 one inch “S” hooks and 5,000 feet of braided wire just for us but he was super nice, helpful and patient! Thanks Ben!

This vase was the main non-floral supply used for our exhibit and approximately 500 of them were used to create the topography design. These vases are currently available for sale at the Beautiful Blooms Boutique.

Wednesday before the flower show the flowers began to come in from our suppliers.  Everything had to be checked in for quality and color to make sure we had all of the items that were ordered for our exhibit.

Look at these gorgeous flowers that came in for the show. Wait until you see what we did with them.

Jason is cutting all of the wire for the over 500+ vases that are to be hung. We had to make sure we had just the right wire to hold the weight of the vases, water and flowers. All of the colored water for the vases was dyed prior to us heading over to the show. We had predetermined all of the water colors in advance to make sure they worked beautifully together in the display and worked with the flower colors.

Here’s Amanda, Maya, Justin and Jake starting the wire of the steel structure prior to us moving it to the Philadelphia Convention Center. Look at the sun we had created in plexi for last year is shown in the photo too.

Stay Tuned for the next images of the actual construction of the piece.