You’ve never seen silk flowers look this good, we promise. While we will always be lovers of the incredible beauty of fresh, real flowers, there are some times and places that false flowers work best. We’re happy to see that silk flowers can still be used to create a natural-inspired design!
Read on for more from Sarah Winward:
“The shoot took place in the beautiful alpine mountains of Utah. I’ve lived here all my life, and I come up to this spot every summer to see the views and the wildflowers. I have always imagined a little wedding here. The wild beauty and rugged strength of the mountainside can be such a beautiful metaphor to love.
The most important thing to me when creating flowers is that they look fitting in the environment that they will be going in. Whether that is a wedding in a field, a corporate event in a modern building, or an arrangement for the dining room table, I want to make sure the flowers look appropriate for the setting. When I am working out in nature, it is of utmost importance to me to make sure the flowers compliment the surroundings or look like an extension of it.
For this shoot I collaborated with Afloral.com, to create this wildflower ceremony setup in the mountains. The mountain setting here has plenty of big views and beauty that is large scale, but this particular spot had pretty dry, barren ground and we wanted to create a soft setting for this little wedding ceremony setup. I usually use fresh flowers, of course, but there are certain times where using false flowers is really helpful! I have used false flowers in large installations as an under layer to fresh flowers. They are a great way to flesh out the foundation to the installation so that you can put the more fragile, real flower on top and have a structure underneath them that isn’t at risk for dying. I create ceremony installations all the time in the outdoors in dry, hot weather, and have to work very hard to keep them alive until the ceremony begins. Mixing false with real flowers is a great way to bulk up the fresh flowers you are installing, and they wont wilt! I was able to find some beautiful flowers in lavender and white colors from afloral.com and they looked totally natural in the setting. All of the flowers in this ceremony setup were fake, and people only knew they were fake when I told them!
I put these into the field in clusters that mimicked the way clusters of flowers would grow there naturally. I used bricks of foam or small round floral pods to hold the flowers. Since the flower stems have wire in the center, they were strong enough to poke al the way through the foam and into the dry ground so that they were more sturdy. We used a variety of flowers in lavender and white tones, and placed them in the grounds in varying heights so that they looked like they were naturally growing there. We nestled the foam pieces down into natural low spots in the dirt, or behind some greenery that was naturally growing there. If there was foam still showing through the clusters of flowers we cut some false greenery down low and plugged it into the foam to cover it.”
