Bridal Inspiration Board #67 ~ From Wedding Moodboard Inspiration To Reality: Botanicals

Today we wanted to share with you a little insight into the design process of a wedding planner and designer, walking you through how they do things at Pocketful of Dreams and showing you how they took one particular inspirational mood board, created for Love My Dress, right through to reality.

Hi folks, Michelle here from Pocketful of DreamsBack in April this year we were harping on about Botanicals and how it was a key trend for 2013 across the design world, all very English country garden but with a strong focus on natural beauty and Victorian naturalist collections. We put together a series of inspirational mood boards showing how we would interpret the trend for a wedding design and featured them on Love My Dress Blog. Because we loved this look so much, we decided to team up with two fabulously brilliant creative businesses: award winning Florist Jay Archer and photography duo Weddings by Nicola and Glen for a lovely day spent playing with flowers in Jay's studio

They helped us take the inspiration to reality to create this…

TITLE HEADER_600

We thought it would be cool to give you a little insight into how we go about creating something like this here at Pocketful of Dreams.

Even before we get to create these lovely mood boards for our clients, each and every single wedding and event we work on will begin with a concept, and it is ALWAYS driven by our clients. The design concept will generally be an amalgamation of the bride and groom-to-be's own personal style and their individual hopes and dreams for their wedding day. To get to this point we need to really get under the skin of our clients tastes and personalities, so we've developed some fun and simple exploration exercises that we use at the very start of the design process . It's our job to read between the lines, tease out anecdotes, ask questions, and expand on the ideas that have already begun to form. The next stage is for us to review the answers – we usually shed a tear or two at this stage at how amazing our couples are – before we analyse the key themes coming through. Often it's really clear to us exactly what direction to take their design so that we create something true to them, a design that is grounded in personality.

The next stage in the process is the visuals. We've talked and talked, we're confident that we know what our clients want but we need to check we're all on the same page when it comes to interpreting those key wants. It's so difficult to work with words alone, for example rustic could be used to relate to countryside style, while to others it may simply mean rough or textured.

So we bring it all together into a moodboard, one that distills their story into something meaningful, giving a visual flavour of the design and helping us to communicate that what's in our heads matches what's in theirs. Our mood boards are really the lifeblood of our design process as they not only allow us to check with our clients that we're on the right track but they also help us to communicate that vision to a wider creative team. On any one event we could be working with florists, stationers, cake designers, props houses, caterers, you name it. With a solid moodboard in place we can be confident that our entire creative team is working towards the same end goal, whilst of course having the chance to input their own expertise, design flair and creative magic to our ideas to really bring them to life.

1 - Mood Board_600

So you see, they're not just pretty pictures thrown together, mood boards have a really important purpose for designers like us. It's true for any event that once you have the design concept nailed, it's important to ensure that you pick the right suppliers to bring your vision to life.  We adore florist Jay Archer's natural, unstructured style and her obsession with hedgerow foraging to create stunning, one-off floral displays.  So when it came to choosing a florist to bring this look to life, we knew Jay was our go to gal.  And Nicola and Glen were similarly a joy to work with, bringing a clean, crisp and fresh photographic style that allowed our design and creations to truly sing.

Working with Jay, we created two arrangements to help set a calm and gentle scene with a focus on natural materials and bringing the outdoors in.  First up, a stunning textural arrangement featuring hellebores, garden roses, jasmine, fern, beech, clematis, astrantia, foraged seed heads and eucalyptus.  Displayed in a stunning copper jug on a vintage style mahogany dresser to add a warmth and antique edge to the look.  The arrangement was unstructured, asymmetric and a little bit wild, perfectly creating that authentic exploration of nature we were seeking.

2 - Arrangement

Regular readers of our inspiration posts on Love My Dress will know that here at Pocketful of Dreams we do love a stylish floral head-garland.  But this time we were keen to put a Pocketful of Dreams twist on the standard floral garland, wanting to showcase something truly Botanical and more than just floral English-country prettiness. 

So building on the idea of Victorian naturalist collections, for our second floral look Jay Archer created a rather beautiful floral headpiece for displaying on top of a scientific phrenology head.  We love how this really brought the Botanical design to life, and how using something unusual like this as an alternative to a vase made for a really unique and eclectic centrepiece idea.

3 - Centrepiece_600

To showcase these beautiful florals to best effect, I put my design skills to work to create a really simple backdrop of observational nature drawings on textured parchment paper.  This helped to add depth and a softness to the set up which perfectly complemented the organic feel of the floral arrangements.  A backdrop like this adds a focal point to your displays, for example if you have a dessert station, cake table or even for behind your wedding breakfast table. The drawings could be layered up for a more decorative effect, hung from twine using little wooden pegs or pasted onto a huge piece of MDF for a DIY photobooth backdrop – even better if you take it outside to sit within nature itself.

This same design could then be used across other more practical paper goods for a wedding day – making pretty table numbers and even place card or favour labels, really helping to add a cohesive look and feel to your day. Something that is relatively simple to DIY if you have a little photoshop knowledge, the botanical drawings were purchased from Etsy and simply downloaded, then printed on our studio computer.

4 - Paper Suite_600

We love the calm and unstructured look of this design and love how Jay, Nicola and Glen helped us to give it life. We hope that you have enjoyed this new feature giving an insight into how us wedding professionals work through from inspiration to reality, do let us know what you think in the comments box below and fire away with any questions you have about gathering inspiration, creating mood boards and briefing suppliers.

Don't forget we offer a design service to wedding planning couples to create wedding mood boards just like these, we can work with you to help you refine your ideas, adding our extensive knowledge of what we know works and providing you with a set of comprehensive mood boards that you can use to brief your own team of suppliers. Get in touch for a quote.

Michelle & Vicki xx

Creative Event Designers at Pocketful of Dreams

Heart


Pod

Annabel

Annabel View all Annabel's articles

Founder of Love My Dress. Passionate Podcaster and Editor. Annabel lives in rural North Yorkshire with her husband and business partner Philip, their two daughters and menagerie of furry hounds. She loves photography, meditation, walking, being outdoors and star gazing. She is fierce when it comes to championing talent within the wedding industry and when she's not working on Love My Dress, she supports her husband Philip in the running of the family's sustainable flower farm and floral design business, Moonwind Flowers. In 2013, she became a published author.

Close
Top