Wedding Flowers

Photos by Sean Marshall Lin

If you haven't already seen my posts on my bridesmaid dresses, which I designed and sewed from scratch, you can view the whole sequence starting here.

Flowers weren't something that was incredibly important to me going into the wedding planning process. And they still weren't that important to me in the weeks leading up to the wedding. When I saw my wedding pictures, though, I was THRILLED with how I ended up handling my wedding flowers and centerpiece flowers!

It was important to me that all the bridesmaid bouquets were the same to tie everything together. That was my only real prerequisite. I've seen pictures from other weddings with a rainbow color scheme where the bridesmaids each have a totally different bouquet to highlight flowers and foliage in their dress color, but I'm really not a fan. It seems to lend itself to more of a hippie vibe, and I wanted the flowers to contribute to a traditional feel... uniformity, uniformity, uniformity.

How to dye silk flowers

This post has moved to my new blog at https://bobbinsofbasil.wordpress.com/2013/09/13/how-to-dye-silk-flowers/. Head over there :)

All my hand-dyed silk gladiolus (with one bunch of white, undyed
flowers for contrast)

This post goes along with my post on my wedding flowers. Since two of the colors in my rainbow color scheme don't exist in nature, and the purple was hard to match perfectly, I dyed silk gladiolus in three colors: teal, blue, and purple. 

I didn't like any of the online tutorials I found, so I came up with my own method based on several tutorials I found for faux-dyeing fabric with acrylic paint, shown in the pictures below.

**Not all acrylic paints are created equal! I had lots of success with Apple Barrel brand, but the Folk Art brand was horrible for me. The purple turned out much lighter than I wanted, despite multiple rounds of dipping.**

My method involved using acrylic paint and fabric
medium (I used Martha Stewart because it was the only
kind I could find). Mix the paint and fabric medium as
instructed by the fabric medium (mine recommended
a 2:1 ratio, I think). Add water. The more water you
add, the lighter the color will be. I'd recommend about
a 1:1 ratio of water to the rest of the mix. 
I mixed a blue and green color together
to get the perfect shade of teal.

Stay away from my tomatoes, you obnoxious birds!

My makeshift bird shield to ripen tomatoes on the plant instead of picking early

As if it weren't bad enough that my tomatoes are suffering from early blight, all the ripe ones have been sampled by the local birds. I don't want to pick them early. They taste so much better when they're ripened fully on the vine!

The few tomatoes (or tomato halves) we did get to eat have been delicious. I'm no stranger to fresh summer tomatoes, but I honestly don't remember anything better. The one shown below was growing on a broken stem that I had splinted together. I cut off the entire piece of the vine as soon as the tomato started ripening, and I placed it in a vase of water until it was ripe. So it managed to avoid bird damage.

Here's to hoping my bird shield (a plastic fruit container like berries usually come in) keeps the birds away without trapping moisture/heat or blocking sun and that my tomato plant recovers enough from early blight to produce more deliciousness. Now I just need to buy some more berries or pre-cut fruit because I only had one container!