2013 in review — March: Flowers for a big fat (fake) Indian wedding

2013 was such an amazing year for me — crazy, busy, wonderful, but I didn't really have enough time make it a priority to keep up with my little record-keeping here. So I've decided to sit myself down and write a few posts about what happened last year.

March was exciting with Bouquets to Art happening and me having the opportunity to help the awesome team of Chestnut & Vine with the big exhibition centerpiece. I've posted plenty about that when it happened, so I won't recycle it here.

Classes were well underway at that point; in fact, by mid March it was already time for Midterms. I had signed up for Intermediate Floral Design, Advanced Floral Design, Flower & Foliage ID and Care, and Ikebana, although I ended up dropping Ikebana half way into the semester because my class load was just a little more than I could handle.

The Advanced Floral Design class is also called "The Wedding Class", because it primarily covers bridal bouquets and designs for ceremony and reception decor. The midterm project was a group design, for which each team got to choose a wedding theme and then had to design all of the pieces to go with that theme. Our group chose a big, colorful Indian Wedding as our inspiration, and we had so much fun designing ceremony garlands, centerpieces, and all sorts of floral decorations for our imaginary Hindu wedding couple.

Our lovely team in front of our display right before the class critique. Every group got to set up their designs in the classroom, along with an inspiration board that described other elements of the wedding theme.

We went with a bold, vibrant color scheme of orange and fuchsia, accented with lime green. Certainly nothing for the faint of heart, but so perfect for a festive Hindu wedding!

Barbara designed this beautiful chair or pew decoration with orange tulips and ranunculus and fuchsia anemones and nerines. I just love the bold, asymmetric design.

Not only did Julia create a gorgeously patterned pedestal for the wedding cake out of button mums and spray roses, she also baked and brought in a delicious chocolate cake for us to share!

Chelsea took on the centerpiece. The gold-painted Fiddleheads are such perfect accents to the overall theme. And wouldn't you just love to sit down and find this stunning napkin decor in front of you? Those speckled Vanda orchids are amazing.

I created this decorative floral panel to adorn the Welcome Table of our imaginary Indian wedding. The carving of Lord Ganesha rests on a low, Pavé-style design made out of carnations, ranunculus and hypericum berries.

Julia was in charge of crafting the traditional ceremony garlands worn by bride and groom. So beautiful!

We worked really well together as a team and just loved our bold, colorful designs. It's one of the great things about class that you can experiment sometimes with styles and designs that may not necessarily be in high demand or easy for you to sell to clients. This way, you can stretch a bit creatively and try something outside of your comfort zone.

So much for March, stay tuned for April!

Kitayama Brothers Gerbera Festival 2013

I attended my first ever floral competition this past weekend! I competed along with some of my fellow CCSF floristry students at the Kitayama Cup — a fun, not-too-serious competition these wonderful local growers hold for their annual Open House and Gerbera Festival.

We got to choose from an amazing selection of cut flowers and foliages, and had to create an arrangement and a mixed bouquet in 60 minutes. It sounds like a lot of time, but it flies by much faster than you think — not finishing in time was my biggest concern. But I did, and while my designs didn't place, I had so much fun and was just happy for the opportunity. (And honestly, proud of myself for not being a complete nervous wreck walking into it: I usually don't handle pressure very well, to put it mildly.)

This competition was a trial run for our CCSF Floral Design competition team, as we will be competing next week at the annual symposium of the American Institute of Floral Designers in Las Vegas. Almost a whole week packed with lectures, demonstrations, receptions and parties for all us flower geeks!

After the judging was done, the arrangements we made were auctioned off to the Open House visitors to benefit the Santa Cruz State Parks. Quickly seeing multiple bids for my designs was a great feeling, and I can now proudly say that I 'sold' my first floral creations. Onwards!

P.S. Many more pictures of the day and competition are on the Kitayama Brothers Facbook page.

The Bouquets to Art 2013 Centerpiece

Every year for Bouquets to Art, one lucky floral designer is chosen to create the exhibition's centerpiece, which is typically a large scale floral installation in Wilsey Court, right in the heart of the de Young museum. This year, the committee chose Svenja Brotz from Chestnut & Vine for this project, and commissioned her to create a piece inspired by the Dutch Golden Age, to go with their current exhibition of Dutch paintings from the Mauritshuis, including the famous “Girl with the Pearl Earring.” Svenja created an amazing, 16-foot tall structure filled with the most beautiful yellow roses, gerberas, cymbidium orchids, anthuriums, football mums, carnations and craspedia, accented with gold-painted succulents. The piece featured a stunning solid slab of monkey pod wood on one side, and high-gloss polished metal on the other, and was a real show-stopper.

I had a wonderful opportunity to help Svenja and her team with this piece, and am still totally in awe about how smoothly it came together and how stunning it looked in the space. Below are a few pictures from the installation, and the de Young created this cool time-lapse video of the construction process.

The 16-foot tall golden column really stood out in the restrained architecture of the de Young's central foyer, and created a focal point opposite Gerhard Richter's huge black-and-white mural “Strontium.”

During the opening gala, the piece was artfully illuminated and glowed like a beacon of yellow golden light. It also cast really interesting-looking shadows on the museum foyer's dark floor.

I am so grateful to have had the opportunity to help out with this breathtaking arrangement, and watching visitors marvel at it on numerous occasions throughout the week was just too fun. Have a good week, everybody — perhaps think about your own larger-than-life creative ambitions!

Bouquets to Art 2013: Highlights

This week is Spring Break and I don't have any classes, which is good, since it gave me some time to sort through all the pictures I took at Bouquets to Art last week! I will do a separate post about the fantastic arrangement I got to help out on, but here are a few highlights from this year's exhibition. I just love the creativity that so many of the designers used to interpret their artwork, and the skill involved in creating these pieces. There are more pictures in a Flickr album over here, if you're interested. Enjoy!

I just love this interpretation of Manuel Neri's Seated Girl II by Michael Holmes Designs — great color, shape, and full of attitude, just like the original!

Yoko Klingebiel's design was one of my favorite pieces in the whole exhibition. She captured Dorothy Napangardi's Sandhills with such elegance and restraint (and not to mention skill!).

Nathan Oliveira's Weaver, brought to floral life by Michiko Shimoda. I like how they relate to each other, as if they're in a conversation.

Thomas Hovenden's painting of an abolitionist leader on his way to the gallows, The Last Moments of John Brown, and the brilliant interpretation by Neil Hunt. Genius!

The team of Poppy's Petalworks came up with this pretty design for David Regan's Cod Tureen (not pictured). I love the color, and the contrast in texture between the cork bark and the flower petals.

Friends of Filoli's version of William Joseph McCloskey's Oranges in Tissue Paper. Great choice of materials!

Jessica Rao captured the earthy and rustic feel of George Fuller's Girl and Calf...

...while Yukiko Neibert embraced the striking elegance of Robert Henri's Lady in Black with Spanish Scarf.

An arrangement and its muse: Guy Pène du Bois' Seated Nude, interpreted by the team of Lavender in Sonoma. The skin tones in their flower selection were delicious.

Another female-inspired design: Sunshine Flowers' take on Eastman Johnson's Woman in White Dress. Now who wouldn't love a dress made from the loveliest selection of white flowers?

Books and flowers? Heck yes! Main St. Floragardens shows us how, with their detail-rich interpretation of John Frederick Peto's Job Lot Cheap.

Soft textures and earthy tones in Joan McLellan Tayler's version of Figure of an ancestor or deity.

Swing on over to my Flickr album for more pictures of Bouquets to Art 2013, and check back later this week to learn more about the design I got to work on!

Coming up: Bouquets to Art 2013

How I have lived in the Bay Area for almost nine years and hadn't heard about Bouquets to Art until last year, when the instructor of my floral design class encouraged us to visit this fantastic annual exhibition, I will never know. You'd think that an event combining art and flowers would have been on my radar all along, but it wasn't so. If you have never heard of it either, here's the long and short: Over 100 Bay Area floral designers choose a piece of artwork from the collections of San Francisco's esteemed de Young museum and create an arrangement, drawing inspiration from that particular piece. The arrangements are then put on display alongside the art that inspired them, for a special five-day exhibition.

Bouquets to Art 2013 is coming up next week, and I am extremely excited to be able to say that I helped to work on one very special piece for the exhibit this year. Here are a few impressions from last year's exhibition, and I can't wait for this year's show to open to the public on Tuesday!

Floral Design Seminar with Natasha Lisitsa

Natasha Lisitsa of Waterlily Pond Floral Design is one of the first floral designers whose work I ever registered as something uniquely different and beautiful, more art than craft, and distinctly recognizable. I first saw her work at a bridal show years ago, and have since seen it at weddings and events and of course at the DeYoung museum here in San Francisco, where she is one of the truly memorable contributors to the annual Bouquets to Art exhibit.

Wouldn't you love being greeted by this fantastic arrangement in your entryway?

I had the wonderful opportunity to assist Natasha and her team at a 3-day floral design seminar a few weeks ago, and between the days that I helped to prep and pack and set up for the event, and the time I got to spend watching her demonstrations and lectures and helping out the participants in the design studio, I had the most amazing time. Not only did I get a peek into how she finds her inspiration and goes about executing her ideas, but it also turned out that Natasha and her team are some of the nicest people you will ever meet. (And let's face it — nothing is sadder than to find out that somebody whose work you admire is impossible to be around.)

In the mornings, Natasha and her head designer Carla would demo some of their fantastic arrangements, talk about where the inspiration for each piece came from, and how they executed it. Natasha likes to work with unusual materials and isn't shy to incorporate rattan caning, metal mesh or paper filling material into her arrangements to create intriguing mechanics that don't need to — and shouldn't be — disguised (unlike traditional materials, such as floral foam or tape).

A couple of the designs Natasha and Carla presented on the first day, incorporating ratting caning and paper mesh.

In the afternoons, the seminar participants got to work on their own creations in the workshop studio, and were able to try out many of the materials Natasha and Carla had introduced in the morning sessions. Dye baths for rattan caning, power tools for drilling and screwing, and branches the size of small trees were all lined up along with the more usual floral tools and supplies. None of the students seemed intimidated in the least, and everybody went straight to work. Towards the end of the day, Natasha critiqued every arrangement, and offered candid and insightful advice on how a piece could be improved.

A couple of the students' designs from the first day of the seminar. Aren't they great?

The second day focused on large scale installations, something Natasha is definitely known for. She generously shared information about her workflow, stressed the importance of proper lighting for any floral arrangement, and discussed considerations regarding materials, size and scale, restrictions and many other aspects of creating larger-than-life floral sculptures like Elemental, her 2009 Bouquets to Art contribution. (If you're interested, here is a fascinating time lapse video of the installation of Elemental.)

The painted Manzanita branches in this gorgeous chandelier are somewhat of a signature feature in Natasha's work.

On the third day, the group got a special tour of the San Francisco flower market, and then went on to visit Yerba Buena Gardens, armed with their cameras and sketch pads. The idea was to capture some of the many architectural and landscaping details of this urban parklet, which they were then asked to use as inspiration for an arrangement to complete that same afternoon (think Project Runway challenge). The results were as diverse as they were impressive, and really showed how much the participants had embraced Natasha's affinity for exuberant creative expression and bold use of unusual materials.

During the critique for the Yerba Buena Gardens-inspired arrangements at the end of the third day.

The seminar was hosted in a formerly industrial building in San Francisco's Dogpatch district, which is now home to mostly creative businesses — photographers, event planners, catering companies — and has sweeping views of the city and the East Bay. Natasha and her team had made sure that the seminar participants (some of them from places as far as Florida and Hawaii) got to take in as many of San Francisco's treasures as possible and didn't run out of energy, so they served up tasty breakfasts and lunches from hip local businesses like Kitchenette. We got to use the space of Hands On Gourmet for our lunches, and ever since I'm thinking about possible opportunities to host a cooking class party there.

It was really fantastic to be part of the seminar, and I got a lot of inspiration and new ideas from it that I can't wait to try out. And judging by their enthusiasm, the participants from across the country all felt the same. Thank you, Natasha and team!