Kimberly's bouquet

My girlfriend's daughter was married a few summers ago and a year before the wedding she came to me asking advice on flowers. We talked about her love of gardening, herbs and cooking and decided to weave the flowers in her wedding around these themes. Her mother, Sherri, whose garden backs onto mine, and I planned out a wedding garden for Kimberly and brought home hydrangeas, dahlias and roses in shades of purple from blue-violet through red-violet. Sherri edged the new garden with lavender, purple sage and silver thyme.

A year later, I carried arm loads of flowers in from both her garden and my own and set up a florist shop in my entry way. I made so many bouquets I lost count. Each table had a center bouquet and 5 posies of herbs (lavender, rosemary, thyme, sage, oregano - all herbs de provence to go with packets of the dried herbs and recipe cards). The wedding aisles were lined with hanging cones. Large bouquets graced the gift table, wedding book table, bar etc. My husband had to make a carrier for the back of my car to transport it all.

A few days ago, I pulled out some old photos and decided to use Kimberly's wedding flowers as inspiration for a bead soup.


If you look closely at one of the bouquets you can see the expanded analogous colors of blue-violet, violet, red-violet, pink and even into red-orange. Notice the deep, dark shadows and bright highlights which gives depth and movement to the color palette. This depth of color can also be captured in a bead soup by including dark and light shades of each color family. The resulting bead soups contains over 50 different tubes of seed beads in all sizes, shapes and finishes.

'Kimberly's Bouquet' bead soup