awesomesauce

Between this insane dress and hat combo

via once wed

and this insane floral display

via truly smitten

it's been a good day in blogland.

flowers!

Yesterday was a big steaming heap of amazingly productive exhausting fun.  My mom and I met our friend Ros and her son Alex in the city yesterday.  After a quick powwow on what we were looking for, Alex left to go sort out a upside-down book and we hit the flower district.  Turns out we didn't have to go far.  Pretty quickly we found Kathy at George Rallis, Inc., a flower wholesaler.  We liked what we saw, the flowers were in good shape, pretty and well organized.  After about an hour of questions and pointing and saying "5 bunches!" "50 stems!" and "will that be enough?" we had ordered a whole bunch of flowers and were set to pick them up the Friday before the wedding.  Here's a sample I threw together to give you a taste of what we got. 

After lunch on the go, we headed into Jersey to Ros' wholesale floral supplier (she's the queen of the Maplewood Garden Club and has the hook up!), Suburban Wholesale Florist.  We got all the little goodies we need, plus the tall vases for the bar, aisle and card table.  At first we'd bought a whole bunch of 5" glass cubes for the centerpieces, with the plan to possibly spray paint them gold or silver.  Lo and behold, as I'm walking out, I spot none other than a whole whack of 5" cube vases in silver and gold!  Successed!  So we took a bit more of their time and switched out clear for metallic and were on our way.

Our last stop was Ros' house for powwow part 2.  We went though our list, figured out how we actually wanted things and cut out all the stuff we ordered because we had big eyes and well, flowers are pretty.  After chopping off about a third of what we ordered, we felt pretty damn accomplished and celebrated with some awesome Chinese food. 

I was so exhausted, I went to be at 10:30 (not my usual 3am) and slept 11 hours.  It was a good day.  Now, off to work on the chuppah and ketubah!

A lovely weekend

Ari and I have had a really lovely weekend so far.  Thursday (what?  It still counts.  It was almost the weekend!) we had dinner downtown at our favorite Indian restaurant.  Ari met me after work, but I went down to play with my new camera a bit.  There's a train yard right downtown, with some really great brightly colored cars that stay there all the time.  Here's some of my favorites.

Then, this morning, Ari and I got out early (for a Saturday, and for us, at least) and headed over to the first farmer's market of the year.  Turnout from both vendors and attendees was better than in past years, but the offerings weren't astoundingly special.  Our best purchase was an awesome but too small for the six bucks we paid for it barbacoa quesadilla that we shared for breakfast.  On the upside, lots of people to shoot!  My favorites (unsuprisingly) are of people eating their lunch from the same place we did!

After the Farmer's Market, we went to pick up Ari's car from the shop (little baby had to have it's 15,000 mile check-up.  I periodically remind him he loves me more than the car.  He knows, sometimes he just needs to remember. ;o).  From there we decided to check out Sam's Club.  Verdict?  Decidedly less awesome than Costco.  Almost as sad inside as Wal-Mart.  Only thing it had over pretty much everywhere else - free Cuervo Margarita samples.  Now, I'm not a margarita kinda gal (I pretty much hate them), but nor am I the type of gal to turn down free booze.  Especially from the top shelf.  Anyhow, I ended up getting myself the sequel to The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson (which was INCREDIBLE.  Let's just say I won't miss Ari when he goes to work Monday, because I'll be up to my elbows in an awesome novel.), The Girl Who Played With Fire.  I got tired of waiting to get of the list at the library.  The only bummer is that Larsson died shortly after delivering the three manuscripts (Dragon Tattoo, Fire, and the third book in the series, The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest), no more from him once it's over.

Well, that was a tangent I hadn't planned on.  Oh well.  Go with it.  The other thing I got was a nice bunch of these cute pink flowers (no idea what they're called, the sticker just said "filler flowers") that I arranged in the 5 vintage vases from Goodwill last month.  I think they came out pretty well.  This whole flower arranging thing isn't too hard.  ::runs off to knock various wooden things::  If you're beginning to sense a theme, you're a sharp cookie, you.  I photographed the flowers too.  But that's it.  No more... for tonight at least.

Hope you're having a lovely weekend too!

Like "preservation," but better.

Mason Jar Bride had a cool little post today.  She had succulents as a bridal bouquet, and after the wedding she planted them.  Six months later, she still has them.  Sure beats the hell out of hanging them upside down in the closet for a month!

 

Pretty sweet, no?

Simply Unbelievable Florals

I have a list of things I want to blog about.  I have lots of tabs open that have yet to make it to the list.  I have lots of things to say that you haven't heard yet.  But I saw Ken Marten's work today, and all of that took a major backseat.  Ken is a florist extroadinaire out of London.  His work is big, bold and modern, but what I really love about it is that it manages to be all those things while still being creative and shaking off some of the hard edges that modernist decor (even florals) tend to have.

These two are going to the top of my inspiration file for my wedding centerpieces.  All the hydrenga is affordable and he really makes use of the big ticket flowers he includes.  Plus, I love all the varying textures and heights and the use of greenery and branches.

 

Ken also does really great things with presentation.  I would never have thought to use eggs as mini vases!  (Plus, my soft spot for ranunculus...)  And I've always loved the idea of fruit as decoration, I tend to find it done so that it doesn't look so great, and really, the big value of doing something for cheap is only when it doesn't look cheap.  Let's just say, this does not look cheap.

As usual, I am a sucker for surprising uses of baby's breath.  No exception here.  And I love the ornaments in the vases.  I love glass vases, but not always the look of the stems, so ornaments in a wide vase is such a cool way to conceal them!  This could be really easily adapted to be less Christmassy, I would think.

All this and so much more in Ken Marten's flickr stream.