Day Three

So, I have been thinking about what to write about today. I don't want bloggers to feel they have to talk about royal wedding flowers necessarily. So, the invitation is out to add any comments concerning wedding flowers or floral work in general.

Yesterday, I checked out another blog that concerns royal weddings and one had a great section on bouquets. It gave descriptions of the biggies, Diana, Sarah Ferg., The Queen Mother, QE II, etc. Hopefully I can find that blog again and post a link here so everyone can check it out.

My topic of the day is bouquet construction...

After hearing from David Longman, designer of Diana's and Sarah's bouquets, I learned that he used, what he called the "moss ball" method. In my years in floral design, I had never heard of this technique. If anyone can offer some insite here, it would bel appreciated.

Simply by viewing pictures of these bouquets and others, especially from the 40's, 50's and 60's, they appear to be mainly "wired and taped". By this I mean that the flowers have been stripped down almost to the blossom in most cases and false stems of floral wire wrapped in tape are added. When these are combined and sculpted and further taped together, the bouquet takes it's shape. Basically, in my mind, making a bouquet this way is like making a giant corsage.

Only about three times during my career did I construct bouquets using this method. By the time I was making bridal bouquets, Martha Stewart was on the scene with her wonderful Martha Stewart Weddings magazine. At which time, almost all brides I dealt with wanted the hand tied nosegay, round bouquets. There were very, very few brides who really wanted to leave it up to the designer to create the look, shape, size, and floral content of their bouquets.

My goal now is to take up the "wired and taped" challenge and create one of these bouquets myself to see how it turns out.

If anyone has some suggestions for me on the wire and tape method, please let me hear from you.

Terry.