Tara Martin-Crawford, LWPI’s intern at Preston Bailey Designs, continues her work with florals this week. Tara is a graduate of Preston Bailey’s Signature Wedding and Event Design course, and she is the first LWPI intern to work with Preston. She has only a couple of more weeks left in her internship. This week she talks about helping re-create some of Preston’s signature floral pieces.

This week was a very busy one for PBD. Cho Phillips and some of her team flew in from California to film the lessons for Lovegevity’s Wedding Planning Institute and Preston’s next courses, which will focus on floral design. It was great to finally get to meet Cho in person since she and I have only had communication over the phone and through email. The new courses that she and Preston are creating sound awesome, and they will offer great learning opportunities for both experienced and novice floral designers. Creating the centerpieces and amazing floral pieces that PBD is so famous for would seem like an immense challenge for almost anyone. Not only are they extremely detailed, but creating them requires a lot of imagination as well as knowledge of working with flowers.

In order to showcase its famous florals the PBD Floral Department had to recreate some “classic” pieces as well as design and create new ones. One of the projects that I was given was to create a poodle out of ivy leaves and hot pink carnations. The base for the ivy was made out of chicken wire wrapped around bunches of white tissue paper. I used hot glue to secure the ivy. The foundations for the carnations were floral foam balls that were sprayed with water and plant food in order to keep the flowers alive longer. I was told to choose buds that were either fully or partially open. For ones that weren’t fully open, I used my fingers to spread the leaves and open the bloom as much as possible. The stem was trimmed to approximately three-quarters of an inch and pressed into the foam until secure. Hot glue was also used for buds that didn’t want to stay in place.

Again, when creating pieces with fresh flowers it is important to pack them in tightly so that they hold in place and stay alive longer. Also, you should always start placing your first flowers in the area(s) where you need a smooth border. That way you can make sure the edge is straight and neat and move on to the rest of the piece from there. The piece that I created wasn’t one that I would consider large in scale, especially for PBD. However, it was a lot more time-consuming than I thought it would be. You have to have a lot of patience and really take your time when you create a floral sculpture because even for smaller pieces you will probably need to hand-place a good amount of flowers.

All in all I think that my dog turned out pretty well. After having the opportunity to create a piece pretty much from start to finish (I had some help along the way) I think that I will definitely do a better job next time. As the saying goes, “practice makes perfect”.

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