What does a florist do in the winter? Pt 1 - Design Boards

In the Washington DC area, there is spring wedding season and fall wedding season. Spring season is from April to June and Fall is from September to November. Any other month is either too hot or too cold for very many weddings. As I'm just now heading in to the winter off-season, I decided to bring you along for the ride.

So what DOES a wedding florist do in the winter??? Start prepping for spring weddings, of course! This includes one of my favorite things to do: design boards. Its where I pull together all kinds of inspiration images to bring our collective vision to life! These can get pretty detailed, starting with the overall color story, the composition of the bouquets, ceremony pieces, centerpieces, etc. Images are mainly collected from Google, Pinterest, and (ideally) my own portfolio .

I start by gathering the types and colors of flowers I plan on using. Spring wedding? That means we'll be using ranunculus, anemones, poppies, tulips. Fall wedding? Dahlias, dahlias, dahlias! And cosmos and zinnias. I also have my year round staples, like roses, spray roses, stock, and more. I try to be as specific as possible here, as this will be where we really show the color palette we're going for.

Once we've established color, I move on to the individual elements at play throughout the day - bouquets, boutonnieres, ceremony arch, aisle decor, cocktail hour, bar decor, reception centerpieces, installations, etc. I try to maintain the color story in these images, but my focus shifts a bit to shape, movement, size, and flow for these pages. It can be hard to find one perfect image to show exactly what I intend to create, which is a good thing. It means your wedding will be unique and not a replica of something that has already been done. But it also means trusting your designer (that's me!) and trusting their process. Here's the bouquet page that goes along with the color story above.

The color is there, but not exactly. No sprinkles of light blue and lavender and overall, very little yellow. But the shape, size, and movement is what I'll be going for. You'll notice a lot of coral charm peonies (the big coral flower) in the bouquet pictures, but none in the color story. This was supposed to be a spring wedding but was postponed to fall due to Covid. I couldn't guarantee peonies that late in the season, so I chose to exclude them in the color story to manage expectations. But we got lucky and ended up with just one bunch of coral charms. Good thing peonies are huge, so it was plenty. And now for the finished product!

And the bride's reaction to seeing her bouquet for the first time!

She absolutely loved it! And I did too. It might be my favorite bouquet of all time. But then again I say that about a lot of bouquets.

So there you have it! A little glimpse into my design board process. Shoutout to Jenny Bosak Photography for the amazing pictures of the bouquet and bouquet reaction.