flowers again!

this weekend's project was turning this bathroom full from the shower to the door with flowers, into over sixty arrangements

the bouquet and the transportation in this ginormous van, where i thought i was going to have eighteen heart attacks. good thing after the first time when the arrangements started falling over, i caught them, and my dad drove even more smoothly for the rest of the thirty minute drive out to the venue

because i was worried about these guys:

but you have to understand that i lost sleep over:

a. the engineering of these centerpieces

b. how the heck i was going to have time to do eight of them

c. their transportation.

they made it!

the centerpieces that seemed to go on forever. there were twelve of them:

the arch that became an entire family effort:

my dad wired all of the flowers at the top, jess made a million arrangements in little glass, hanging jars, rachel and i were sticking flowers every in every gap and putting rose petals everywhere, and my mom helping my dad know where to wire and putting flowers everywhere:

beautiful bride and her dad (and another arch decorated by some angel relatives of the groom ):

jess, me, rachel. pretty good considering five minutes before the wedding started, all of us were covered with lily stamen, and we were all sweating in the 95 degree heat and changed into these less embarrassing clothes:

success! and even though it was a lot of pressure...i think i'd rather be making these everyday than most other jobs. 

so...anyone getting married soon?

roxanne's wedding!

yay!

i just wanted to show you how some of the flowers i did for her turned out! one of my favorite if not my favorite wedding i've ever been to! roxanne and sam were so cute i couldn't get over it, and i had fun helping set up and be a part of the wedding. i love that girl so so much.

here's her bouquet and his boutonniere:

yay!


other beautiful things from the wedding:





love love love

all images are from fabulous alpha smoot photography
where you can see the rest of the wedding

also, i wrote this the night i got home from roxanne's wedding, and well, i'll just post it here if anyone is interested. i read an essay my professor wrote the other day, and he formatted it kind of like this and it made reading it so fast. so. we'll try that:

Roxanne got married today.
I thought about the first time we walked around a small town together in the Lake District
and one of the last days in London when we went to the Victoria and Albert Museum
and we looked at the jewelry exhibit and discussed each ring excitedly,
deciding if we would ever wear it for our wedding ring.
I remembered visiting together a dozen antique stores and rummaging carefully through the stalls on Portabello Road looking for just the right gifts.

I thought about this while we drove to the Manti temple
and I watched the rolling brown and green hills
and I sat next to cupcakes with melting blackberry frosting in the cold, spring sun for the reception later that night.
I wore a yellow bridesmaid’s dress and a white fabric flower in my hair.
So did the two girls in the front seats.

I actually felt kind of awkward today because I liked just watching Roxanne.
Of course everyone was watching her because she was the bride.
But it was the type of watching that you do when you’re watching TV.
Not usually when you’re watching real life and it’s odd to stare.
I guess it’s less weird to know that she’s a dancer.

When she’s smiling you can feel the smile all the way through her clapping hands,
and when she laughs her whole body laughs with her,
and when she’s excited you can see it down to her feet jumping up and down.

While I watched her dance with her new husband for the first time and then with her dad,
I remembered the way she danced as we walked through fields of yellow flowers
and long grass in Dorset,
both our hands skimming over the top of the grass in the bright, spring air.
We were both without any attachments, really.
Free to talk about our weddings in abstract, non-committal ways.
Free to do whatever we liked, to travel the world,
to assert all of the independence we could ever want,
to work and to live and adventure with each other and with ourselves.

But tonight was the first time she wouldn’t say goodbye to Sam,
and I swallowed a bunch of times—tried to swallow that lump. I watched her from my table as I swallowed a piece of wedding cake instead.

It still looked as though she were laughing
though her face was only smiling
her hips swaying to the music as she gently helped her partner around the dance floor.
She was twirling gracefully,
her gown that reached right below her knees wrapping around her legs,
and her gray, antique wedding shoes helping her glide along the floor.