Earlier this year in September we traveled from Salt Lake Utah where we are based to St George Utah for a Southern Utah Elopement styled shoot as part of a photography retreat put on by Kennedy and Reggie from Kennedy Kiara Photography and Reggie Ann Photo and Film. We where traveling down there to to provide a colorful broken floral arch, bridal bouquet, and small tablescape. We love traveling and were thrilled with opportunity to travel and work with some amazing local vendors.

The details

The flowers

• White cosmos
• Blue delphiniumn
• Moab roses
• Peach ranunculus (a personal favorite!)
• Feverfew
• Antique caramel pink carnations
• Pink stock
• Orange tulips
• Yellow butterfly ranunculus
• Tiffany roses
• Lady Eva roses
• Tree fern green
• Huckleberry green

The mechanics

• Chicken wire
• Arga Wool from New Age Floral
• A PVC pipe arch structure (created by Will)
• Fishing line

Our experience

The day started early for us as we had to load our truck with buckets of flowers and all of our tools and arches before starting the four hour drive to St. George Utah. We had a grand time on the way enjoying the beautiful Utah landscape and all of the thousands of sunflowers lining the freeway.

There are pros and cons of every season in regards to being a florist and the difficulty with the warmer months is keeping the flowers from wilting. We knew this would be an issue designing outdoors in the heat, so we prepared by picking up all of our flowers the day before the event so they would be fresh and ready to last. The only thing that we premade before leaving was the bridal bouquet which we kept in a vase on the way down.

When we got to our location we quickly got to work soaking our Agra Wool and wrapping it in chicken wire. We put together our PVC pipe structure that Will had made the week before and attached the Agra Wool to the structure with zip ties. We immediately noticed that the PVC structure was wobbling under the weight of the Agra Wool, so we leaned it against an obliging fence in the parking lot and got to work adding our Huckleberry green to the wool. It was so hot that we opted to leave our truck AC on to keep the flowers in the car cool, as they definitely would have wilted had they not.

It was so unbelievably hot that our speed was definitely affected by the heat, and we were going a lot slower than usual. I was so nervous that the flowers would not hold up because of the heat. It ended up taking us about four hours to complete the broken arch, and we anchored it use fishing line to hold it in place. The flowers amazed me by holding up beautifully, although I made have a few premature gray hairs over them haha.

The Final Product

Vendors

• Planning: kennedykiaraphotography.com and reggieannfilm.com
• Featured images: reggieannfilm.com
• Floral: mareelforal.com (me haha)
• Hair and Makeup: instagram.com/karlalbeauty