Inspired by Fire!
The sequel to my icy blog and a positive inferno of creativity! With a focus on the alternative bouquet that happened when I was asked to create an alternative bespoke bouquet for the Fantasy Realm of The Unconventional Wedding Festival a place bursting with unique wedding ideas!
Dragons were going to be a major inspiration for my creations as I had already been working on a project with the innovation centre in Derby, so I knew that these majestic creatures most certainly had to play an important role in the creation of a fantasy inspired, Game of Thrones led alternative bouquet.
With a mood board provided by Unconventional Wedding and few conversations about materials, a Swarovski palette of crystal Xilions was decided upon; from deep indigo, purple velvet, ruby and garnet through to bright reds that were almost orange in sunlight. Surprisingly to me, as I thought Lannister gold would be predominant, copper wire was chosen over a gold coloured brass version, apparently they didn't want it too yellow, which was fine by me!
Wonderfully, having a copper base really lent itself to creating a heat of the fire feel and with semi precious stones, including fire agate and garnets added to the abundance of Swarovski crystals an inferno of colours were put together inspired by flames, from the blue of a flame centre, through purples and reds to the oranges of the tips.
Most importantly I wanted to make sure there was symbolism within the bouquet, although after some thought I felt tiny sculptures of images wouldn't suit the subtilty that I also wanted to get across. I happened to be watching an episode of Game of Thrones when John Snow was talking about dragon glass, ideal, I thought and Obsidian became a prominent feature of this fiery unconventional bouquet.
Originally planning on having 700 stems (100 to represent each of the seven kingdoms) I realised after making the individual stems, that the weight of combining such a large quantity of semi-precious stones with the 6000+ Swarovski crystals would have been rather heavy. After asking my lovely CRZyBest Facebook followers for their views in a poll, I went with making a large bouquet of 500 stems and a second smaller bouquet with 200 stems.
My next step was to make sure I had the dragons made for the bouquets. I created the biggest copper sculpture that I had ever made, which only just fitted into my kiln and a variety of smaller ones in bronze and copper to embellish both bouquets and the matching buttonholes. I was lucky enough have the expertise of the people who make the clay I use via Instagram messenger. Prometheus gave me firing advice, even working out bespoke times for the carbon firing of my not so tiny dragon sculpture.
Unusually instead of being attached to the stems and being a part of the main bouquet, I decided that my tiny dragon sculptures along with my not so tiny centre piece would sit around the base of the bouquet, along with some hanging down on the ribbons. The ribbons were created especially for me by Laik Style in organic silk, using natural dyes in colours to match the bouquets perfectly, a gorgeous and eco-friendly replacement to my usual double-faced satin.
Completing the wire twists around the base of both bouquets was the last area of refinement and with the ribbons wrapped and dragons attached, my Fiery alternative bouquets were ready for showcasing at the festival with some amazing models dressed by Powdered and Waisted Corsetry, alongside lots of other fantastic suppliers including the Rachel Burt who kindly took these awesome photographs.
Other Fantasy Realm suppliers were:
Vintage Monkeys
