Making A Pomander-Without Floral Foam

As some of you know, Local Color Flowers made a New Year’s resolution to give up floral foam this year. Last week, we had a new floral foam free design challenge-flower girl pomanders.

A floral pomander, or kissing ball is a basically a ball of flowers that is carried on a ribbon “strap” like a purse. Normally, we would use a little floral foam ball, soaked in water, filled with flowers with a ribbon attached.

The end result would look something like this.

To tackle this design challenge, I first posted a note on the Flower Farmers facebook group. This is a relatively new group made up of flower farmers, designers and enthusiasts. My post elicited lots of suggestions and comments which was super helpful. I was surprised and how many people had tried inventive, creative ways to make pomanders.

I took the ideas to the studio with me and posed the challenge to Carling and Irene. Our idea was basic-find something round that we could poke flowers into or glue flowers to.

 

This hodge podge group of materials represents some of the items we tried: an apple, a tulip bulb, a ball of boxwood rigged together and a wired ball of moss.

After a couple attempts, we settled on a little ball of crumpled up soft, aluminum wire stuffed with moss. we then used oasis floral glue to glue the ranunculus on to the moss.

The end result looked great!

For improvements, I think we would try to just use a ball of moss or something that could be totally composted.  Overall though, I think we were excited about the results.

If anyone else has made pomanders without using floral foam, I’d love to hear about your experience and any suggestions you have for floral foam free projects.

2013: The Year Local Color Flowers Gives Up Floral Foam

You know when you set a goal for yourself (run a marathon, loose 20 lbs.) but you don’t want to tell people, because you’re afraid you’ll fail? That’s a little bit how I felt about giving up floral foam. After reading Debra Prinzing’s book the 50 Mile Bouquet, I was inspired to make the change. I loved reading about west coast designers that rejected floral foam because of poor environmental and health impacts. But I felt nervous…committed for sure…but nervous.

It’s not like we even use floral foam a lot. We don’t. But we have used it. We used it for floral wreaths, pomanders, centerpieces in shallow vessels and more.  Floral foam is great at what it does, keep stems in place and hydrated.

When I’ve mentioned to people in the past few months that we’re going to give up floral foam, they inevitably ask WHY? (and give me a kind of crazy look) There are two main reasons we’re doing this:

• Floral foam contains formaldehyde and other carcinogens
• Floral foam is not biodegradable, recyclable or compostable
• Floral foam is expensive and not reusable.

As a company, we want to use LESS harmful materials, generate LESS waste and spend LESS money on “stuff”.

I knew there were alternatives to foam, especially for centerpieces, but I didn’t really understand all of them and still don’t, but I’m ready to learn.

Our first lesson came from Carol Caggiano when she came to do a training for us back in February. Carol showed us how to use curly willow and soft aluminum wire as a base to hold our stems in place.

Just crumple it up…and voilà!  the wire is reusable and the curly willow is compostable.

Since then, we’ve used it a few times in situations where we would have used foam.  It worked great, including in this large arrangement with a very wide opening and a very shallow base.

It also worked great with this tiny crystal, footed bowl.

Over the next year, we’ll do a series of blog posts any time we’re faced with a design challenge where we would normally use foam. We’ll keep you posted on our progress and our creative solutions to eliminate floral foam. Write or comment and tell us about your green practices!

Real Weddings: Michele and Justin

After a short winter break, weddings have started up again here LoCoFlo and we’re so excited! Michele and Justin were married this February in an intimate ceremony in their Hampden home. Surrounded by a small group of family and friends, Michele and Justin committed to a beautiful life together.

Michele and her sister Lyndsey were awesome in providing us lots of creative inspiration from Pinterest for décor.  Using winter as a theme, we used lots of creamy whites, evergreens and browns with pops of red and purple to create a seasonal backdrop for this beautiful wedding.

The bride’s bouquet was filled with locally grown white tulips, paper whites, dusty miller, camellia foliage, succulents, mini-pine cones and lotus pods.

The mantle, decorated with candles, evergreens, pine cones and mercury glass votives, was being watched over by an awesome winter owl.

To create a special spot for the ceremony, we constructed a birch arch with some evergreens, pussy willows, pinecones and flowers for the couple to stand in front of.

After the  ceremony, the couple and and their family and friends enjoyed dinner at the newest farm to table restaurant in Federal Hill – Liv2Eat in Federal Hill.

Dinner took place in a private room in the restaurant. All of the details in the intimate location were super fun to put together. Each of the chairs were decorated with a burlap wrap and pine cones.

We made these awesome birch place card holders (with cutting help from our friends at Baltimore Architectural Detail) for each of the guests. The matched perfectly with the birch covered vases we used for the centerpieces.

 

Special thanks to our winter growers! Growing flowers/foliage in the winter is not as fun/easy as growing flowers in warmer weather. We’re so grateful for folks like Farmhouse Flowers, PlantMasters, Seaberry Farm and LynnVale Studios for growing year round!

Special thanks to Kirsten Beckerman for these beautiful photos. To see more photos from Michele and Justin’s wedding, check out LoCoFlo’s flickr page.

Finally, thanks to Michele and Justin for allowing us to be part of their most special of days. We’re wishing them both a lifetime of happiness together!

Buy Local This Valentine’s Day!

Valentine’s Day is fast approaching! Be sure to pass by those grocery store roses and choose a beautiful  floral arrangement filled with locally grown flowers that your Valentine will love!

Choose from a $40 or a $70 arrangement filled with locally grown tulips, foliage and pussy willows. Each of these arrangements can be made in a mason jar, milk glass vase, garden vase or birch vase.

Maybe you want to give you sweetheart a little more local love this year. Choose our All Local Gift Basket for $100 which includes our $40 floral arrangement together with some of our favorite local treats!

Finally, for the gift that keeps on giving, you can choose a Local Color Flowers flower subscription which will provide a seasonal, monthly or weekly arrangement to your Valentine. This is a great way to experience the best our region has to offer throughout the year. Contact us for more information.

We’ll be delivering on Valentine’s Day in the Baltimore City area or you can pick up your arrangement at our studio in Charles Village between 11am and 6pm.

To place an order (earlier is better!) use our online order form or call (410-262-1494) or email (ellen@locoflo.com) us!

The Fight for Local Flowers this Valentine’s Day: Whole Foods Promotion of Globally Sourced Flowers

Last week Whole Foods’ blog featured a post titled “Share Your Love With Whole Trade Flowers”.  The post promotes buying “whole trade” roses from Whole Foods that were sourced from Ecuador, Colombia and Costa Rica. According to Whole Foods, their definition of  their “Whole Trade Guarantee” is:

• Meets our product Quality Standards
• Provides more money to producers
• Ensures better wages and working conditions for workers
• Cares for the environment
• Donates 1% of sales to Whole Planet Foundation®

As you can probably guess, the networks of local growers that we work with were a buzz with this news. East Coast and West Coast growers alike expressed anger, outrage, frustration and disappointment. Whole Foods has a huge amount of buying power and influence so for them to urge people to buy foreign grown flowers on the biggest floral holiday seemed like a slap in the face to the American flower farmers. Growers and supporters alike bombarded the blog post with comments  urging Whole Foods to support local farmers.

Many of the comments recognized that improved standards on flower farms in places like Colombia, Ecuador and Costa Rica are needed. Many applauded Whole Foods attempt to improve conditions in foreign farm communities. However, they generally did not believe that this “Whole Trade Guarantee” was a good reason to ignore the environmental impacts of shipping flowers from thousands of miles away. They also were vocal that there are local options available and  buying local should be the consumers first choice.

For me, the timing of this debate was interesting because I myself had just been challenged publically about the value in buying local as opposed to supporting low income farm communities in places like Ecuador, Colombia and Costa Rica by buying their flowers.

Is the answer black and white? Clear and easy? Probably not. For Local Color Flowers, we’ve built our company on a commitment to buying local flowers from growers within 100 miles of Baltimore and using them for all aspects of our design work. We made this commitment for lots of reasons including:

• Our desire to run an environmentally sustainable business that does it’s best to have a small environmental footprint
• Our desire to work directly with farmers and farm families that we know (and love)  to provide our clients the best product our region has to offer
• Our belief that investing in small businesses in our own community is critical to making our community and region financially stronger and more culturally diverse.
• Our belief that local flowers are superior in both quality and vase life to flowers that have been shipped in from thousands of miles of way

Our region has a strong cut flower industry that provides cut flowers/foliage/potted plants/flowering branches and more year round. We believe it’s good for us, our community and our business to buy local.

Does that mean it’s BAD to buy Whole Trade roses? No- not bad. It’s probably better than lots of the choices out there. I just believe that when possible, buying local is the right first option.

Tell us what you think! Tell Whole Foods what you think!

Becoming A Social Entrepreneur: LoCoFlo Style

For the past year or so, I’ve been attending a local meeting of the Woodstock Business Conference. I was excited to meet Peter Lorenzi, professor of management at Loyola, not only because he was from Buffalo-but because like me, he was passionate about Social Entrepreneurship.

Peter teaches a Social Entrepreneurship class to mostly graduating seniors at Loyola. A few months ago Peter asked me if I’d be interested in coming in to talk to his classes about my experiences. Of course I said yes! One of the big reasons I became a Social Entrepreneur was because of an entrepreneurship class I took at Loyola as part of my MBA program. Taught by Jeffrey Robinson, the entrepreneurship class was a practical class where teams wrote and pitched businesses plans. My team chose my idea to pursue-Dulces Vegan Bakery. It was a great, confidence building experience that helped me realize some important things: 1) Business can do a lot of good (social entrepreneurship) 2) I wanted to be in control of my own destiny 3) I had the drive and skills to become a business owner. Each of these realizations was somewhat shocking to me-shocking but also totally exciting!

I headed over to Sellinger Hall on Tuesday morning to talk to the students about my path to Social Entrepreneurship. I know there are stories of entrepreneurs starting out in their bedrooms/garages when they were teenagers (or earlier).  There are folks that say they never thought of doing anything else but owning their own business. That wasn’t me. Clearly. I came to Social Entrepreneurship slowly….unexpectedly. Lots of experiences in my first 35 years in life set me up for it when I look back-a childhood where service and commitment to your community was expected, becoming vegetarian, a Jesuit education which emphasized service for others, a stint in the JVC, years working and living in low income communities in San Francisco, an MBA from Loyola, a desire to make a difference and a desire to to my own thing. Funny how all of those things prepared me for LoCoFlo.

The classes went well.  A few students spoke with me after class. One student, who’s boyfriend owned a floral shop in NYC was excited to call him after the class to tell him about the talk and “make him stop using floral foam” (we’re converting people everywhere!).  Another student was on the board of the environmental club on campus and was interested in having us come talk to their group. 

I hope the students took from my talk that anyone can become a social entrepreneur. You just need an idea you love and the drive to pursue it.

Flooded with Vintage Lace from A Beloved Grandmother

One of LoCoFlo’s new year’s resolutions was to step up our bouquet wraps this year. Don’t get me wrong, we’ve done some really fun bouquet wraps! (yes, that is a bike cog!)

But I  was hoping to make bouquet wraps more of a statement this year. I have been searching around estate sales and flea markets for interesting lace or ribbon…Truthfully, I  haven’t found much that caught my attention.

A few weeks ago, one of our design assistants mentioned that she was cleaning out her grandmother’s house. She was trying to sell or give away a lot of what was there. I asked her if she had any lace or doilies- I mean any grandmom’s house should have some lace and doilies right?

I almost cried today when I opened the bags Irene dropped off.

Not only was the lace beautiful, but I was so touched that Irene would share it with us. This is what she told me about it.

“my grandmother was a seamstress so i have a lot of cool fabrics & trims - not to mention some amazing dresses!
The story is that when she was 14 she took her mother's lace table cloth and cut it up to make a dress. Big trouble!
She would love that we are continuing to be creative with her stuff.”

I can’t lie. I miss my gram every, single day. I am so excited that we are using Irene’s gram’s lace with our flowers. It’s a great reminder that “vintage” often times means…from someone we love.

Thanks Irene!