Transport of delight !

With the crisp, autumn mornings come these identifiable flying objects. Somewhere, deep down in a pile of old National Geographic magazines, I have a photo of a whole barrage of them flying over Paris: from memory they were all old original designs.

I've never actually been in a hot air balloon, but I will one day soon ... maybe next time I'm in Paris !

Autumn ... liquid amber

Autumn is very, very nearly here. Some of the liquidamber trees near the shop are just starting to turn red, and the nights are definitely longer, and cooler.

Yesterday, I made bouquets for a bride who had 6 bridesmaids, all of whom were wearing creamy-yellow long gowns. The bride had seen the orange posy which features on the Calypso Flowers website, but wanted to incorporate more of the yellowy orange tones. The posies feature 4 different coloured roses, together with red freesias (with a yellow throat), and beautiful hypericum berries. I can't wait to see some photos from the wedding itself !

The bride carried creamy white roses, with white freesias, green privet berries, and 'Jade' floating Singapore orchids. It was sooo pretty !

First, choose your shoes !

When we first discussed this bride's flowers, she told me that the brides- maids would all be wearing black dresses, but that they would wear shoes of various colours ... red, yellow, lilac and blue... and that she would like the posies to be very colourful.

I think I fulfilled the brief !

We didn't have lilac roses, because they diluted the other colours, or blue, because I don't think that you can get them, apart from dyeing them, which I just wouldn't do - it's just not natural! We did have red, fuschia, oranges and yellows, which looked great, and the ribbon on the stems of the hand-tied posies matched their shoes, so there were no arguments !

(The bride wore fuschia shoes).

February - Wedding Season

I've quite forgotten that I had 2 holidays in the last 12 months, it's always so busy once the year starts... Valentine's Day is upon one before one knows it, and the general stress level for that is pretty high. February, being peak summer, is also very popular for weddings, in fact I am providing flowers for weddings every weekend from January 31 until February 27.

February is also peak heat season - very stressful for florists - and last week was no exception: it was 38degrees and blowing a gale. It was very tricky thing to decoratively tie 15 metres of tulle to the Amora Hotel's riverside gazebo where the wedding was to take place, and I was quite concerned that the flowers on the posts would be air-dried before the ceremony even began. But they survived, as did I.

The flowers were roses with 'floating' Singapore orchids in a beautiful amethyst colour. I really like this style of posy, because you can introduce as much colour as you want and /or need to . For this wedding, the bride and her 3 bridesmaids all had the same style - the bride's was bigger than the others.

I also made a pretty wrist corsage for the mother of the bride.

(Next holiday is March 8 !)

Bad Blog Day !

I don't know if I'm overstretching myself in the multi-tasking department, trying to cook a gourmet meal whilst uploading photos, but I just couldn't get the CAKE post to work (see below). I apologise. Hopefully I'll be able to get the missing photos on this one, and although I'm a bit of a Francophile, I can hardly justify the enormous accent !!

Let them eat cake !

I've had a bit of fun - a lot of fun, really - making the decorations to go on the top of cakes. We did a BIG wedding cake late last year, where the brief was to have lots of flowers, and to have them cascading down the sides. The cake was in front of a mirror, so the back was on view too.

Last week I did another one for a chocolate mud cake, also for a wedding. The theme colours for the event were red and chocolate brown. Her bouquet (which we also made) was a posy of red roses, and for the cake, I thought some semi-ripe blackberries would be a perfect colour link, as well as providing some textural contrast.

Yesterday was Lauren's engagement party, and she was going to have 60 chocolate cupcakes on a 3 tier glass cake stand. She wanted very bright flowers to put onthe top tier. Très gai, non !

A Second Summer Holiday

This year we decided to rent a larger-than-we need house on Phillip Island for a week, and to invite friends to come and stay for as long or as short a time as they wished . The house had 2 decks, the one at the back of the house was great in the mornings, and the front deck had a fantastic view over Westernport Bay.

On Friday night we had 7 people staying and had a great barbecued meal together. Contrary to what one might think, entry was not on the condition of wearing a Hawaiian shirt !

We had great weather...not too hot...not too cold...and did holdayish things like jigsaws, and swimming, and having a glass of wine with lunch, and I even got to go out for two minutes in the canoe, but the water was a bit choppy.

Apparently, with Global Economic Crisis, and especially in Europe, many people have been forced to stay at home for their holidays, causing the term 'staycation' to come into being. I invented the term 'fakation' for a holiday at home, because it's not really a holiday, it's more just like 'not working' - equally valid, but not nearly as good as vacating one's usual environment.

So after not one, but two holidays this year, I'm truly hooked !