And so it begins...

Fancy a sneaky peek at some of the work that's been going on today in preparation for the festival? Here you go...

Starting to work on 'The Old Rugged Cross'.

Blocks of colour ready for loading into crates. All the blues and purples still to do, especially as more flowers arrived today!

'On Jordan's Bank...'

Working together...but on different arrangements.

Remember the mechanics I'd made?

Here's one of the three arrangements I used them in, just to give you a taste of what's to come.

And the rest? You'll just have to wait and see. Or better yet, come and see us over the weekend, because the photos never do the arrangements justice. 

Lots more still to do tomorrow but everything HAS to be finished by 7.30pm when the doors open for our preview event.

The flowers have arrived!

They were a little later getting to church than we'd hoped, and there are still a few more to come, but THE FLOWERS HAVE ARRIVED!

All the preparations, all the designs, all the mechanics-making...all of it will come together over the next two days with the most beautiful of blooms and some talented arrangers to create 'Sing for Joy!'

Here are a few pictures from today;

In the back window, there were some marvellous mechanics appearing. 

Can you guess what this will be?

A small team armed with secateurs conditioned all the flowers after checking them off against Rita's master list. There are a few still to do - it seemed to be most of the blue flowers that were missing, oddly enough. Then we sorted the flowers into buckets for each arrangement and moved them into church. It's hard to believe that these fairly unimpressive tubs are going to be turned into fabulous displays over the next two days.

These will become a Bible, an Indian garland and the resurrection...

Sometimes there are props to help create the display - this is a hand painted backboard to make our altar look like the one in CSI St. Mary's, Pudukkottai.

While we'd waited for the flowers to arrive, some windows were dressed completely.

All they needed was their flowers;

There were some fabulous colours appearing in the windows...

...while some were more muted yet full of potential.

And today, the altar cloth arrived for the quiet room too. Laura had taken my idea and created something way, way better than I could have made. I was moved to tears. 

'Father, I place into your hands...'

Oh - and those marvellous mechanics I showed you earlier? Here's what they looked like by the time we left for home...

Almost time...

We're a week away from opening the doors to our 'Sing for Joy' Flower Festival, and things are getting busy...

It's not just about the flowers, you see. They are the main attraction, of course, but we also have an army of bakers producing refreshments, stewards lining up to oversee proceedings, stall holders getting their wares ready to sell, marquee men ready to put up a tent for the stall holders, people making paper people for our woodland trail, and the festival booklet being finalised before printing.

In the last week, I have:

- painted a backdrop to cover our altar and make it look like the one in CSI St. Mary's, Pudukkottai.

- hand copied the beginning of the hymn 'Come on and Celebrate' onto a board.

- wrapped canes and test tubes in coloured wool.

- invited some VIP's to the festival.
- laminated signs and hymn words for the woodland trail.
- consulted with the maker of the quiet room altar cloth.
- made last minute adjustments to the festival booklet.
- sourced blue fabric for the vicar's special arrangement.
- supplied photos from a previous festival for a press release.
- practised tying a flower garland - Tamil style.

- tried to find a source of dried locusts to go with the honey...

Behind the scenes, the rest of the arrangers are no doubt working out all their last minute details too, but the fun really starts next Wednesday, when the flowers arrive from the wholesaler and we get conditioning...

And if you'd like to come and see us, here are the details:

When a plan has to be changed...

We decorated for another wedding a few weeks ago - the delay in posting is due entirely to me being on holiday and the automatic scheduling not working for some reason! 

In all my years of doing weddings, I think this was the first one that we'd had problems with and had to change our plans...

Problem 1. Cabbage roses are VERY expensive: £4 a stem. As we needed around 170 (!) we'd have blown the entire flower budget just on this one flower type. So we had to change the order - reduce the number of roses and order double lizianthus instead in the required colours. 

Problem 2. The wholesaler could not get hold of white anemones, even from Holland, but he kindly replaced them with a black-eyed white mini gerbera to create a similar effect. We ended up leaving these out of the bouquet for the bride as they weren't a suitable alternative for her, but they were still able to be used in church.

Problem 3. Tight peonies. I discovered only recently that peonies do not like to be cut, and need rather a lot of persuasion to open up. After posting on a flower arranger group on facebook, I discovered that if you wash the flower buds in warm water and either knock them or force the outer petals open, then cut the bottoms and let them drink warm water, they will open up. Pleased to say...they did!

Problem 4. The style of bouquet was a loose, unstructured one. I've done handties quite successfully in the past, but they have more of a level outer edge to them. With this unstructured style, I found it difficult to get the right amount of 'sticky-out' bits to add movement when the roses and peonies had a distinct tendency to mass together all at the same level. The bridesmaids' smaller bouquets, with a larger variety of flowers, seemed to go together much easier, and in hindsight, perhaps we should have used a bit more variety in the bride's bouquet too. It's such a fine balance though, doing what the bride has requested while making it look right to the florist's eye! 

(I ought to add that we don't usually offer to do bouquets for weddings at church, but the bride's family are both long standing members of the congregation and friends, who asked us to do them.) 

Anyway, we got round the problems, and I am hoping (as I always do!) that the bride will be delighted with what we've done. Here's what we started with:

Not all the flowers! There were five or six more buckets full...

Some flowers went straight to the bride's mum, to fill jam jars for the reception at the farm. Others were sorted into 'church', 'crate' and 'bouquet' buckets...

It took three of us (myself, Rita and Ginny) around three to four hours to do everything, but we ended up with;

One little bridesmaid's flower ball. A first for me! I have to say that gypsophila fills in beautifully around the pink lizianthus. Not the most perfectly spherical of objects, this first attempt, but very pretty...

A sinkful of bouquets!

Here's one of the five adult bridesmaids' bouquets - a pink rose and pink astilbe, white lizianthus and eucalyptus.

The bride's bouquet has two shades of pink rose, pink peonies, a little bit of pink lizianthus and eucalyptus. 

The next pic shows everything boxed up and ready to be delivered. Look closely and you'll see two buttonholes too; I made the first with a gerbera before we had the message to keep them out of the bride's bouquet, so the second is lizianthus and astilbe, but I wasn't sure whether the groom would go for so much pink. It will be interesting to see which one he chooses... (Incidentally, I tried one of the roses initially, but they looked too massive for a buttonhole.)

In church, there were two arrangements either side of the altar cross;

You'll notice in these arrangements that we also used white waxflower. It's a good filler - a bit like gypsophila, but without the smell of cat wee! In fact, white waxflower has the most delicious lemony scent and was a pleasure to work with.

The windows were left un-flowered as the bride wanted to have candles instead. All the bunting and candle holders have been made by the bride and her mum.

We put a large arrangement in the porch...

...another on the font...

...and then, we did the crates. This was another first for us. We've had a milk churn and a wheelbarrow outside the church door for previous weddings, but this is the first time we've had a stack of crates. I think the effect is quite stunning - like a waterfall of flowers. 

In fact, I like this idea so much, I wonder whether I could do this instead of separate containers for the flower festival...I'll have to think a bit more about that, then see if I can borrow these crates!

Anyway, everything turned out well in spite of the issues we'd had, so I'm just keeping my fingers crossed that the bride likes what we've done.

Wedding season begins

Like most churches, we have quite a few weddings. As a flower team, we offer to decorate the church for a small fee (the bride and groom pay for the flowers) which is then ploughed back into 'flower funds' to cover the cost of dishes, oasis and sometimes flowers for normal Sunday services.

Of course we don't HAVE to do it - sometimes it's the florist providing the bouquets and buttonholes who does the decorating instead, but we enjoy having the opportunity to serve wedding couples by making the church look beautiful for their big day.

Last weekend, it was Naomi and Isaac's wedding; they wanted pale pink astilbe, cream roses (I think they were Avalanche) and coral lizianthus. We put them together with soft ruscus for height and a bolder leaf from my mum's garden for depth at the base. The lizianthus were a variety we'd not used before - the larger flowers were a deep pink, then the just-opening flowers were a pale coral colour, and the buds, cream. 

We had four matching triangular arrangements in the windows, an asymmetric triangle in the porch, and two arrangements either side of the altar cross that should've been asymmetric triangles (but turned out a little flat on the top!) 

In the altar window, framing the cross

Four windows

Porch

The real test is when the bride sees the flowers; that's when we know whether we've done what they wanted. Both Naomi and Isaac came up to have a look before we'd finished and were delighted, so we were pleased too! We try to encourage the bride at least (we find not many grooms take an interest in all things flowery!) to come up and see the flowers before the actual wedding, because on the big day itself, their minds are more focused on the fella standing at the front...and the day often passes in such a blur, the flowers can be missed.

So, one wedding down and it's all quiet now until the next in July...

Sing for Joy!

The Flower Festival is coming up much faster than I'd like it to! (August Bank Holiday weekend...and we're already into April!)

Our theme this time is 'Sing for Joy!', based on hymns and worship songs. 

Originally, I had the bright idea of asking the congregation for their favourite hymn and going with the top twenty, but when I started to look at the wording of hymns, I realised this probably wouldn't be possible. For a start, there are over 600 listed in our hymn book - potentially, every person in the church could come up with something different. I toyed with the idea of picking around thirty titles and getting the congregation to vote on a shortened list, but even that was difficult. When you look at the words, the themes that we feel are so important to interpret are somewhat nebulous to capture in flowers. How DO you capture 'hope' or 'spirit' or 'goodness'?

So we left the congregation out of it. A few of the flower team trawled through the hymn book instead, to find titles that would be recognisable - for both churched and non-churched visitors - and interpretable. We are great believers in presenting arrangements that are not simply floral art; we are Christian and we have a message to portray that cannot be hidden too deeply. (I also have memories of going to festivals where I've admired some of the arrangements but wondered how they linked to what they were supposed to be representing.) Anyway - back to the hymn choosing. It took ages. We ended up with a decent list though, just short of twenty I think, and the flower team met to decide who was going to do which one.

For the first time ever since we started holding festivals, we had multiple arrangers wanting to do the same arrangement! Everyone ended up with what they wanted, but it took some sorting. As one of the 'organisers' of the flower side of things - and I use that term loosely! - we don't prescribe what the arrangements should be. We give ideas for starters, but we believe that the individuals should have the freedom to design their own arrangements, not least because we believe our Festival is a God-given opportunity to share how we feel about our faith with others - and God speaks to us in many different ways.

We're due to have another meeting soon, to see what everyone's come up with design-wise. I've got mine sorted, though I have some mechanics to source for one of them...

The raw materials of a previous festival...

Easter 2016

Easter - a celebration of the resurrection of Jesus. And it's always such a wonderful moment when we bring the best of spring into church to remind us of the promise of everlasting life.

This year, the inspiration for the side windows and porch came from the Flower Arranger magazine.

The flowers never look much in their buckets, do they? The window arrangements would have yellow tulips with grape hyacinths, and the altar arrangements would be Easter lilies with white tulips. (To ensure the lilies were wide open, they were bought a week early and kept indoors.)

There were four of us arranging in the side windows and porch - we all have the same flowers, we take a window apiece, and we work to create something similar to our inspiration. Every arrangement is therefore unique, but from a distance looks part of a thematic whole. See what I mean? 

The altar window arrangements were done by the fifth team member.

This year, we've also incorporated some decorations made by children at Holywell Primary School and those who came to our Good Friday All-Age service.

We were invited to go to Holywell to share Experience Easter with 60 children in Year 3, and part of that experience was to write their hopes and dreams on small sea pebbles. We dotted a few pebbles around the base of each window arrangement.

The Good Friday service had the theme of new life, and after a short church service, we moved our worship into the woodland we are lucky enough to own. As well as toasting marshmallows, doing a nature hunt using green and brown paint samples, and making crosses, the children were encouraged to bring paper flowers to decorate a bare cross. Here it is in the woods:

It's one of the pre-shaped foam holders that are more frequently used at funerals, packed with dry oasis. The children added their paper flowers to bring it to life;

We wanted to bring this celebratory cross into church, so we tied it to the lecturn and rearranged a few of the blooms to show them off better...

So there you have it...Easter 2016 at St. Mary in Charnwood Church.