Simple Place setting Ideas

I have been thinking about simple place settings. I like the idea of a small row of flowers at each place setting, keeping your table line low so your guests can see eachother!


Square runner vase



The neat thing with the runner vases is that you can really fill them or use just a few stems. In some of the photo's in the previous post I have them over flowing with hydrangea and yarrow and in these, we see just a few stems, I love this because the motto for these when they are packaged "is a few can say so much...." it's totally true! It really brings the table together i think and when we use your flowers and color line it helps to tie everything together.





A few more with the Blue runner vase

This is the posey ring! I absolutely love the style of these sweet vases!

The flowers in here represent the style and time of year from which the photo was taken, Fall into winter


I hope you enjoy!

Everyone needs Practice...

I had a few Ideas that I really wanted to try so I thought I'd use a few of the left over flowers from this past weekends wedding and give it a whirl. I had Yarrow, hydrangea and a cream rose to work with.

I used both a blue and a clear runner vase as well as a short wide-neck Waterford crystal vase.

These really feel very "english Garden" to me and I love them!



These are the Blue and Clear runner vases. I think these would be fantastic as place settings and or faovrs for guests. I worked with a bride last june and we did round versions with 8 very small vases all wired together into a "posey ring" for her favors!



This is the Waterford design. I would like to see a larger version of this for a brides bouquet, obviously cleaned up of course, ad some more roses. I also like this as a small low centerpiece.





I love that the Hydrangia and the Yarrow (varied in color) are all from a local grower! I think that the yarrow really brings in the essence of early summer


I think this would be lovely on a table as a centerpiece and then the runner vase as a place setting. What a lovely pair!

Now please take to heart that I put these together in about 15 min, and the flowers were 2 days old and had not been kept in a cooler because they were the left overs and I wasn't sure what I would do with them, not to mention obviously if they were the ones left, they were not my top choice because I won't use anything that I don't consider "top Choice" for my weddings!

The runner vases I have always available to me, my mom makes them! This is just a few of the glass pieces that I was speaking about earlier from the farmers market!

Wedding 7-12-08

Liz came to me in mid February to help her plan the flowers for her wedding in mid July. She knew rite off that bat that she wanted Peonies to be her main flower in her bouquet. She mentioned that she had gone to a commercial florist and they had told her there was no way to get peonies in July, which I do admit is sort of true, depends on how the season is progressing though. They also quoted her a fairly steep price. I expressed that I could do her design for less and that we should set up a time to talk.

At our first meeting she brought a picture of what she had in mind, which was of course full of deep pink and light pink peonies. I told her I would do what I could to get the peonies but also worked out a few other scenarios for her in the chance that they would be unavailable at the time.

The color's for the wedding where in hues of deep deep pink/almost plum color and she wanted shades ranging form that deep pink all the way to cream for her flowers. We worked it out that she was looking for an "english garden" meets modern romance feel!

We wanted to use both Pink and Cream Calla's, three shades of roses, Deep pink, light and cream, she liked the paper thinness of the Lisianthus and she also noted that she wanted very little if any greenery in her bouquet.

The wedding was in July so I had the prime opportunity to work with local growers as well as using both the Dutch and South American markets (the south american market is how we get roses for Valentines day and other such events in the bitter cold!, I.e. thats where most of the commercial roses come from). This year has been a particularly rough growing season, flower growers where ever they are not immune to crazy weather!

For this wedding I actually had better luck with a local grower then I did with my wholesale vendor, We were able to use roses, cream calla's and the lisianthus from the wholesaler and Much to the brides pleasure I was able to find Amazing deep and light pink Peonies from a local grower, along with some of the most beautiful pink Calla Lillie's I have ever seen! We also used snapdragons and Yarrow from our local supplier.

On a side note, I love when I can use a local grower because it gives me a chance to help the "little man" in our small area! It's a comfort to know I can 9 out of 10 times get it from a major wholesaler, but if I have the option to know that my flowers are coming fresh, just picked from a field that's 7-8 miles from my home and i can SEE them being picked, I'm going to use them! It's all about quality!

Here are a few pictures that I took before the our order was delivered, I will post more once the couple gets back their photo's, I'm not the greatest photographer~


These are the Bouquets, they are in the Hand Tied style. When a bride wants a hand tied bouquet I send them in cylinder vases. There are many reasons behind this, one the vases can be displayed on the head table, if you want, and they stay hydrated, and look fresh, often times there is a lapse of time from 1-4 hours between time your flowers are delivered and when you actually take that walk down the aisle, even more often then that there isn't a place to keep them cool, so making sure they are well hydrated keeps them looking great! Last but not least, then your bridesmaids can take their bouquet home and have a lovely reminder of the event for the next few days to a week!


This was the grooms Boutonniere
I used a pink Calla and did two hoops of bear grass to sort of represent the two of them and it also gave it a "modern" feel which is something the bride liked


A picture of the groomsman's and grooms and ring bearer's Boutonniere


A head on view of the bridesmaids bouquets getting ready to go, the small one in the middle is the toss bouquet, also the floral wand is on top.


Liz mentioned to me that she wanted a Floral wand for her Junior Bridesmaid. I honestly drew a blank. SO she explained it and I was still like hmmm on how to make it and how to construct it out of fresh flowers, have it be 24 inches long and have it so she hand wave it around, so we googled it, (last resort!) I realized that this wasn't something out of fresh it was done with silks, so this was our first attempt and I think it worked out pretty well!! (this was actually the test run that i made for my daughter before I did the final one, but they look the same, although the one for the wedding had a few more flowers on top)

This wedding was a lot of fun. I had a lot of creative freedom with in her color palate. We also used the pins in the center of the rose, it seems to be fairly popular~
I also did the criss crossing "bodice" work as I call it on the MOH bouquet to make it stand out just a bit!

I will post more when the get their professional pictures done~

My own Wedding

My husband Josh and I were married this year and of course I did my own flowers.

Our colors for the wedding were in hues of brown and pink which left my flower options really open.

I chose to work with Cream Calla's, Sophie pink roses, cream roses, pink lisianthus, peach roses and a almost gray rose for my bridesmaids. It was winter and I wanted to bring a little spring in.

I didn't want to have a perfectly round bouquet theme going on so I added some snap dragons and heather to our bouquets.

This is my bouquet


This is a strait down shot of my bouquet



This is a bridesmaid bouquet, very springy!
I chose the hand tied bouquet as well because personally I love just a little stem to show, but that's just me! After all I was the bride, and as always, what the bride wants, we try and make sure the bride gets!

I added the cream pearl head pins into the center of my roses as well, I just like the feeling of those. We can also glitz and glam it up a bit and use different color pins in the flowers. They happen to look Fresh and fun in the center of Gerbera daisies!

What makes Phineua different.......

I would have to say the first thing that makes us different is that we are fairly fresh in the industry. So while our ''sophomore' status may make your eyebrows raise take to heart that we have so many ideas waiting to be put into play!

So hi, my name is Josephine. I spent some time working in a high end floral shop in my hometown of Kalamazoo Mi. I loved working with the fresh flowers, I honestly think that there is something so plain and simple out doing fresh floral work, it's just, well, happy! It gives you that deep down feel good kind of feeling. Now this wasn't the start of my time with fresh flowers, oh no, that started long ago at the tender age of 7 when my mom and her sister would sell roses at our local farmers market in the attempt to save a large sum of money to take the four sisters and family to England for 2 weeks. I look back now and think of each of them with their respective jobs selling flowers at farmers market. I would sit on the tailgate of my fathers pick up truck, eating fresh pastry and watch them sell.

As a child I could always be found during the summer out side collecting flowers to make a bouquet and parade around as a bride, I think my love for all things 'wedding' started around age 6-7. I would strip nearly every branch I could reach of our enormous lilac bushes and make bouquets, we had a fence of Spyaria bushes with their trailing arms of small white flowers, which made for an excellent cascade type bouquet. I'd collect grass's and wildflowers from our yard, I even attempted to add swags of pine. My creativity was endless. In the winter my mom would help me create tissue flowers, long before Martha Stewart created her kits to make them.

About ten years ago my parents actually started doing the Kalamazoo Farmers market on a weekly basis, no longer with roses but with hand made terra cotta pottery and glass work ( there will be an example of her glass work ready for a table setting shown below ) So farmers market became a staple in my life from May to October each year. Starting in June the flowers really start coming in from local growers and it's so beautiful down there, I just love it!

So back on track here, after working for a floral shop for a while I just knew that I loved working with flowers and I really really loved doing weddings, so this is how it started for me on the "for real" level.

A dear friend of mine asked me to do the flowers for her wedding. How simple is that rite....no, there is more to the story, When Emily and I sat down and talked about her flowers and her ideas for her wedding, she kept telling me that she wanted it Green, green flowers......I had a few ideas of what I wanted to do so I painted her a verbal picture and she loved it! The fun part of this wedding was that these flowers ended up being our gift to the bride and groom, as in we paid for them! Needless to say we were on a budget, but we had an amazing outcome! We used Jade green roses, which are not Jade at all, more of a limey mint color, cream roses, fuji mums that had just a bit of a pom pom feel to them, cream alstromaria, sort of a small cream tiger lilly, really a pretty flower, we used baby myrtle, which is actually an herb but makes a lovely green filler and to top it off we had sprigs of tall bear grass coming out. Emily wanted sort of a Garden feel for her bouquet, so we decided to go with hand tied bouquets so the stems would show. Now she stressed to me that she didn't like bows, so I wrapped about 6 inches of the stems in green satin ribbon to cover the floral tape of course and then added cream colored pearl top pins every half inch to give it a polished look. The finishing touch was the adding of the same pins to the center of each rose.

We did 5 bridesmaids, one bride, one junior bridesmaid, one toss bouquet 6 boot's and 3 corsages. Really it was lovely. There will be pictures posted down below.

Emily and her Bouquet, my first official wedding


Emily and bouquet


Emily and Scott, this gives a good example of the hand tied bouquet with really long stems, like I said she really wanted a garden feel.


Emiy and bridesmaids (yes I'm one of them) and all the bouquets
Currently, I keep pictures of fresh flowers on my laptop so when I meet with a couple I can SHOW them what I have in mind and let them get a feel, while painting a verbal picture is nice, I think it helps to see what your getting, that way I can get a grasp on what "merlot" for instance means to you, color wise. ( you might be surprised to know the wide range of colors that the word encompasses to people!)

Another part of what makes us different is our pricing. The standard markup for fresh flowers is around 300%. A prime example, wholesale wise, roses generally range from $.80 to $1.20 a stem, now this varies on the month and the season and how growing has been. So for the sake of easy math lets say a dollar, and when you go to a commercial florist, roses are generally around 3.00 dollars a stem. When fresh flowers come in to a shop, you multiply the price per bunch by 3 and then divide by the number of stems in the bunch and that is how the per stem price is obtained.

I don't work this way, simplest way to put it. Every week I have a list of the current prices sent to me via e-mail, the prices change slightly through out the season. For pricing, I charge what the flowers cost! How do I make any money, I charge for my work and for supplies that I use. I like doing things this way because A. I get to do what I love, B. Brides can have amazing flowers for an even more amazing price and C. I hate doing math! (ok C was a joke!)

I am upfront regarding pricing and am here to work with you and for you.

I have a lot of fresh ideas just waiting to go down the aisle. So please take a moment and look around at our pictures, I will be updating often.

Take care,

Jos