The Love Lab

Once again, Design*Sponge, you have come through for me.  I came across this diy flower lab a while ago and loved the idea of giving our reception a hint of a theme of a laboratory.  (I'm surprisingly getting really carried away with this science thing.)  Feast your eyes on this!

I think this is the bee's knees.  It's clean and beautiful and seems like it would be easy to set up yourself.  You could take it one step further and use acutual laboratory equipment instead of containers that only look like beakers and graduated cylinders.  Cute, so cute.

Flower Alternatives and Additions

Thanks again, Young House Love, for having such great taste.

I love the color, airiness, and arrangement of these flowers, but what I love even more is the lovely jeweled flowers hiding in the middle. If you held these all in your hand or tied them together with a ribbon, wouldn't it make a stunning bouquet? The creator of this arrangement uses vintage pins, attaches them to wooden skewers or dowels with green floral wire, and wraps the whole "stem" with green floral tape. Here's a really easy DIY to do by yourself or with a group that doesn't require much time or the pressure of creativity, and the results are so beautiful. I'm also loving the reduce, reuse, recycle aspect of the whole thing. I'll have to remember this...

Minimal Flower Centerpieces

I have been inadvertantly running into a lot of images of flowers that I love this week. The emerging trend is minimal, architectural, and colorful. Observe...

Photos via The Knot

Love these! However you may feel about The Knot and their questionable advice, you have to admit they have georgeous eye candy. One beautiful, architectural anemone. There are multiple textures between the feathery leaves, smooth petals, and rough gritty dirt to keep it visually interesting. I haven't seen a single flower in a glass with the dirt exposed like this before, and I'm really into this classy way to bring the outdoors in. I love the simplicity and elegance of it (which is our shared aesthetic). Then I found this:

Photos and other beautiful things via Eat Drink Chic

How do I love thee, individual and small groups of stunning flowers in a bud vase? I'm lucky my taste leads me towards budget-friendly flower arrangements. What's great about these is that you could do all the arrangements yourself the day before or morning of. Simply go to the fabulous Dane County Farmer's Market to browse and support your local independent farmer, choose your lovelies, and fill glasses with dirt. Sounds fun to me. You could use pretty budget-friendly stemware you already own, or hit up St. Vinny's and Goodwill to find cheap and eco-friendly alternatives. It would also be a way for people who want to help, have basic motor skills, but aren't crafty to contribute to a more communal wedding bash. They say that people enjoy something more if they make/help create it, which I think is true. It would be great if everyone could feel a small piece of ownership of the wedding day, even if it's as simple as "Yeah you like those centerpieces! I scooped that dirt in myself!" It would help add to the feeling of community support and fun I am hoping for. To illustrate, Shelby over at Midwedst offered this lovely post about her wedding flowers. I think it's so cute and perfect that her fiance's aunt is calling them "love flowers," for what else would you call flowers being hand planted especially for your wedding bouquet? That's what I'm talking about...love, guest/family involvement, community. It will be thrilling to see how her bouquet turns out!

Oh Design*Sponge, how I love thee. But first, some background. Andrew is a science guy, and I am a literature girl. For a while now I've been thinking about different ways to incorporate Andrew's love of science into our wedding. One of the first presents he ever gave me was a necklace inside of a test tube he made himself. How cute is that?! I still cherish that test tube. Based on that memory I half-jokingly threw out the idea of test tube rack centerpieces that would act as bud vases...and he loved it! Score 1 for team science, but in my head it looked kind of kitschy (remember the wooden racks from high school chemistry?). Enter Design*Sponge stage right with a beautiful take on this idea:

All you have to do is change the base, and it becomes an elegant test tube rack. The tutorial is here, and it's so easy to accomplish by yourself or with a buddy. If elegance is not your thing, you could easily change the base and flowers to suit your style. The other great thing is that you don't need that many flowers to fill a test tube and get a full, lush look. It would be equally striking as a more minimalist, modern centerpiece with a single flower in each tube. I'm thinking a metal rack, or a couple of those single test tube holders crowded together.