Skip to main content

Arranging & Transporting

Saturday morning the tulips had perked up! Here they are ready for transport.
This is Part III of Extra-ordinary Day.
Centerpieces
The French tulips went into the prepared centerpieces easily, but were very droopy on Friday despite the sugar and drops of bleach I had added to the water. To my relief on Saturday morning they had perked up!  I added more camellia, clematis and some acacia greens for a grey accent.  After a good misting with water I loaded them into cardboard boxes for transporting.
Large Arrangments
Before this event, I had little experience arranging lilies and irises.  Their tall, strong stems were a welcome contrast after arranging 170+ floppy tulips!  I decided to go with two very large arrangments:  one for the entrance table and one for the central hors d'oeuvres table.  The idea was to make a big statement and pull visual focus away from the less attractive features of the parish gymnasium.
The irises weren't all open but a few hours in the sunshine opened up their blooms.
This is the hors d'oeuvres table arrangement in-process.  I stuffed magnolia inside the vase to serve as a natural oasis and a lot of heather in the center with a collar of magnolia leaves to "stop up the drain" as Michael Gaffney says.  Then I began adding the lilies.  Next were the yellow irises and lastly some apple tree blossoms for height, and eucalyptus to the collar.
This arrangement ended up being around three feet tall, minus the apple branches, and weighed a ton.  Fortunately it fit nicely inside a paint bucket for easy transport.
Medium Arrangements
With the leftover lilies and irises I made six medium arrangements.  These were to be used on the bar, the coffee/punch table, the dessert table, etc.  Toward the end I had a lot of purple irises and rather than head back out to the garden to cut more greens I went with a minimalist design for this tall cylinder vase.
Transportation
Our church is only seven miles away so I made two trips.  I put arrangements in cardboard boxes, small and large buckets and wedged them into my minivan.  A dear friend helped, as it was a lot of flowers and some of them had the tendency to tip despite my efforts to stabilize them.  We completed the task before the evening sun set and I went home to set my clock ahead for Daylight Savings and my alarm for 6am. 

To see the final product- the flowers at the First Solemn Mass reception- click here!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Roses for Our Lady: Altar Flowers for the Nativity of the BVM

Altar flowers for the Traditional Latin Mass Feast of the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary.   Roses, Queen Anne's lace, green poms and crocosmia greens.
3 comments
Read more

Processional Litter & Flowers for the Feast of the Assumption

This year for the Feast of the Assumption, the pastor of our little country parish asked if I would help create a processional litter for the statue of Our Lady.    He had the great idea of repurposing an old table!  It seemed Our Lady was smiling down on me that day when I walked into the thrift store and there it was for twenty dollars: a perfect square, three foot, solid oak table. A few months ago, my kind friend, mentor, and owner of Altarations Paraments in Oregon sent me a box loaded with remnants of liturgical fabric.  I added a white skirt around the bottom to hide the table legs and a carpenter attached brackets for the removable oak rods.  I was a bit nervous about creating the arrangements for the litter. They needed to be as light as possible and secured to the litter to withstand being jostled about in the procession.   I found four plastic oval platters at the dollar store, added a block of wet foam, taped it in place and created the arr...
2 comments
Read more

Hydrangeas, Roses & Holly: Altar Flowers for Christmas

                      Unfortunately, this is the best picture I could get of the arrangements for the Latin Mass on Christmas Day.   However, it may serve as inspiration for what can be done in the most unlikely of spaces.   The architecture of the church is typical postmodern, with no vestiges of the past.  The crucifix was added and the tabernacle put in its rightful place only within the last d ecade.  Who would have thought that the Latin Mass would be making its debut here in our isolated, rural community when there are a handful of beautiful, century-old churches perfectly designed for the purpose not far away! The proliferation of fake poinsettias already present in the church set me in motion to find other examples of possibilities for the traditional altar.  My search led me to the liturgy guy's post Does this 1944 Christmas Eve Mass Look Anything Like Yours?   I was inspired by the...
7 comments
Read more