Beautiful Blooms

This year was my first year doing a floral demonstration at the Philadelphia International Flower Show and I was very excited.  I titled my demo “FASHIONABLE FLOWERS” because when I started BEAUTIFUL BLOOMS over 8 years ago my goal was to create a company that could design beautiful floral designs based on my knowledge of fashion and flowers.  A special shout out to Leapfrog Photography for taking all of these photos.

Prior to me starting Beautiful Blooms I had worked in the Fashion Industry doing Product Development, Window Design and Clothing Design in Philadelphia and NYC. I was fortunate to have travelled extensively growing up in London and also with my career to Europe and Asia so had been exposed to a lot of inspiration.  All of these experiences have always been a part of the Beautiful Blooms vision on creating beautiful, unique, creative, fashionable designs.

I am lucky and proud now to have an amazing team of people that make up Beautiful Blooms.

I created two trend boards for my demonstration and discussed the trends and how they trickle down from the “Home” to “Fashion to Flowers”.  This trend board spoke about soft colors and feminine details and you can see my mom peaking out to one side of the board. She played my trusty assistant for the demo.

The first piece I choose to create was a necklace of crystal garlands and flowers. I had been working on a piece earlier that morning that was just not coming out the way I liked so I switched gears. Our studio of over 6500 square feet located in Northern Liberties has A LOT of items in it from vases, to candelabras to crystals, etc. so as I turned my head I spied the crystals.  Immediately my brain started going and I thought about what I could do with these and then I thought about creating a necklace.

I took several strands of crystals and interconnected them so they made three tiers of strands. The back I tied with ribbon so it could be actually worn around the neck. Then I created hand wired balls of delphinium and thistle and wired it onto the crystals.  This is truly a piece of jewelry that I would wear out. See more photos below.

You can see the necklace worn by me in this photo. I accented it with hand wired light blue delphinium and thistle.

This photo here also shows me demonstrating a hand wiring technique.

For my second demonstration, I have shown how we take a tiny moss hand bag and fill it with flowers for a flower girl or even a mother’s day gift.  To add a little more fashion to it I wired three vintage buttons together and made it into a handbag accent.

During my demonstration I showed how we could make a larger version of the small purse.  We created the basic structure of the purse out of chicken wire and then covered it with moss by using Tack 2000. We mad the handles from tightly compacted moss wound in wire and then attached it to the purse.  I then lined the hand bag and added oasis and voila a large purse!

I began to add the flowers into the mix and clustering groups of flowers such as the amnesia roses, King of Kings Japanese Dianthus and Dutch Hydrangea. Everyone loved the Dianthus!

I loved doing this workshop and the Flower Show asked me to come back again next year!   Just a month ago I also did a workshop for the Moorestown Garden Club and you can view that our on blog. Last year I also  headed to Manteo (Outer Banks) Garden Club to demonstrate the making of several arrangements. This is fun stuff.

I can’t wait until I get asked to do my next Garden Club demonstration. I really enjoy getting out there to talk about Beautiful Blooms and design styles.

Thanks to everyone that attended and I look forward to next year. I was already asked to do a demonstration next year at the Philadelphia International Flower Show. What an honor!