Field Notes: Cali to Baja

March 15, 2024

I flew to the west coast last week to visit my friend from high school. Cali was more green than I expected due to all the rain they received over the winter. Here are some of my favorite spots from the trip!

Jasmine vine and birds of paradise flowers, on Cypress Ave between Wilshire and Georgia in San Diego.

The oversized elephant topiaries with trucks up at Balboa Park. So many museums here - if I had known I would have spent the days that it rained here. But instead we binged the last season of True Detective - very good.

The cacti and rose garden at Balboa Park. The rose garden was completely pruned back, so that was underwhelming but in general this area is packed with flowers, I was told.

The plants and flowers, mainly birds of paradise, at our hotel in Baja.
Puerto Nuevo for the night markets and restaurants on the ocean.

The Lafayette Hotel in San Diego. Loved the bar, very Roaring 20s vibe with outdoor pool. So not expensive to lounge at the pool there if you’re not a guest. Yummy matcha but also not hard to get that wrong as long as it’s high quality matcha.

Drove out to Jacumba in the desert for brunch and to view the Superbloom from the past rains. Bright orange flowers took over spots on the highway creating long blurry moments as we zipped past. I thought superbloom was something that happened every year, but my friends said nooooo. Superbloom happened last year, and the time before that was ten years ago. Felt so special to experience it here. I watched it all with the cutest puppy in my lap. My friend’s friend, took us through the desert in his 87 Bronco and it was a real treat.

Ocean Beach for the most beautiful sunset. Pacific Beach for brunch and midday walking.

Also loved the the cliffs in La Jolla, and watching the Navy Seals workout, like a serious workout, on the ocean in Coronado.

Our car got towed one afternoon on the way to Tory Pines which honestly felt so awful at the time, but now just feels hilarious. Also that it happened with my friend from high school feels fitting…on spring break.

I held a private workshop online for one of my students. Looved starting off my last day this way. We made centerpieces, talked a lot about negative space, and resisting the urge to add all of the flowers to the vase.

The weather there was cold and rainy the first couple of days but then warmed up a lot for the rest of the week. I’m so grateful to have had a couple of really warm pool days in Mexico. This winter has been so long and…just long. Happy to say goodbye to winter this weekend. Goodbye, winter! I won’t miss you. ;)

Wintering

March 8, 2024

This time of year is a lot of meetings talking about flowers, planning for the months ahead. No two years are the same. Booking seasons never show the same patterns from year to year which always keeps me on my toes every year. It can feel frustrating when bookings don’t happen, and also so exciting when the bookings go through. Frustrating because getting rejected still hurts, even after working in this business for 14 years. My bounce back muscles are flexed.

In between the work, I’ve been finding joy in the following. Binging Suits since my time spent in Sarasota for the World Champion’s Cup. Dare I say that Suits somewhat reminds me of the Sopranos. Thoughtful, humanizing, beautiful writing, and real, honest, character development. We can all see a part of ourselves in each of the characters. Plus, Harvey! And Meagan Markle. I could go on and on. Quince branches have brought me so much joy this winter. I bought a couple of bunches mid January and just tossed them this week. They lasted so long. Our customers have enjoyed watching them bloom indoors and that makes me smile, too. Hyacinths in bloom with their fragrance. Wondering why I haven’t bottled up their scent yet. Walks at the beach with friends, the very few nights out since this winter was very much about hibernating. And working. And reading. I’m rereading “The Universe has your Back.” And a cheesy Elin Hilderbrand novel.

It’s nice to find a reason to celebrate this time of the year. Maybe every year feels this way, but this winter has felt exceptionally long. I’m always thinking about how I can spend extended time in Puerto Rico, but booked a trip to California instead.

Back to the meetings. I love connecting with my clients in this way, hearing about their dream for their wedding. Looking at photos and the reasons to add specific types of flowers woven into their vision. It can be pretty overwhelming to make design decisions, especially when we have so many design options at our fingertips with social media. The best advice I can offer to anyone planning a wedding, or designing anything really, is to first take the time to look at all the things. Look at all the photos from your friend’s wedding, wedding photographers you admire, Vogue weddings, Pinterest search results for ‘Baz Luhrmann’s Rome and Juliet Wedding’ - not sure if that’s a popular search, but it should be. Pin and screenshot all the things you love, all the images that make your eyes dance a little when they land on an image. Do that for a while, depending on how much time you have. Maybe a month, two weeks? Just let your brain take in the imagery as you slowly start to develop your style.

Next, go into a period where you stop looking at images and inspiration. Almost like meditation. Close your eyes…what do you see? Without the imagery in front of you, what do you remember most? The strongest visuals that pop up in this way are the ones that have stayed with you. Kind of like the feeling when you’re shopping, and you don’t buy the jacket that you fell in love with at the store. But later on, hours later, you’re still thinking about it. Get into that state, that frame of mind. Your event will feel so much more personal that way.

Holidays are here!

November 6, 2023

November is one of those months that feels so busy because we are all preparing. Our studio is busier than ever and I am so excited to Holiday Season with you! We are offering flower arrangements for all the occasions - Thanksgiving, a gift to your client, for you, to anyone you need to say “I’m sorry” to! For all the reasons! You can order, here on our website, for delivery on Thursdays only. For the week of Thanksgiving, we will deliver on that Wednesday, November 22. It feels like November just started but we will be closing our orders for Thanksgiving next week, on November 15th. Ah- get your orders in!

Order Thanksgiving Flowers! — The place card table arrangement that we made for Ailie & Andrew’s wedding this November. We’ll show you more photos of their wedding soon, it was so beautiful! This style arrangement would make a great welcome piece to your event of home for the holidays!

Thanksgiving is a big deal at my family’s house, definitely more than Christmas or any other holiday. I was having dinner with my parents last week and we were talking about the Thanksgiving menu. My dad (who is a Marine veteran and takes hosting kinda seriously and believes that plenty of food means there isn’t enough) mentioned a few times how Thanksgiving was only three weekends away and how the holiday is early this year. I can always count on my dad to keep me posted on how much time we have left, I call it Military time. Now, that kind of talk sometimes sends me into a panic. I mean, we still have three weeks left, no wait, two weeks now. But overall, he’s right. Thanksgiving IS coming up. But also, this isn’t our first rodeo, we’ve got this. (You’ve got this, too!) I offered to help order the pies and said out loud, “I’ll order them next week” and then I remembered that I said the same thing last year and I forgot to order the pies from Palmer’s, the best around IMO (I always check to see if Sister Pie has started to ship from Detroit). So anyway, last year, I forgot to order the pies from Palmer’s in time, and so I had to go with another option, which was good, but it wasn’t Palmer’s. Instead of putting ORDER PIES on my to do list and letting it nag me for the next three weeks, I just ordered right then and there. I pulled out my phone, ordered three pies - two pecan maple and one pumpkin pie. Done. The pies never made it to my to do list and the job was complete. It’s the little things like this that make me happy, because, Virgo. All this to say, don’t wait to order your Thanksgiving flowers! Morale of the story? Do it now!

Made Floral Pop UP at the Shinola Tribeca Store

Two workshops are coming up this month! The first, “Make your own Thanksgiving Centerpiece,” is on Tuesday, November 21 (week of Thanksgiving) at Flat Vernacular in Norwalk from 6-7:30pm. Our next and last workshop of the year is “Make your own Wreath,” also at Flat Vernacular on November 30th from 6-7:30pm.

I am so excited to have Made Floral pop up at the Shinola store in Tribeca on November 18+19 and December 22+23. Shinola holds a special place in my heart, we have been working together for nearly 8 years now! It’s so sweet to work with the Shinola team on the east coast and midwest when I’m back there. Really looking forward to meeting the team, customers, and offering seasonal items for flowers, plants, wreaths garlands. Stop by the Tribeca store on these dates!

Wedding consultations have our team so busy, and 2024 is going to be a very full year. Honestly, out of all my years of working with flowers (13 years!) I don’t ever remember fall being such a busy time for booking for the following season. Booking season is usually January through March, but this year has definitely started early! I love it! I’m so excited for our new clients and the weddings and floral visions that we get to dream up with them!

Also, we have very exciting news that we’ll share soon! It involves warm weather in December!

Mid Season Break

October 4, 2023

This spring and summer have flown by with weddings and events, and starting this week, we’ll be busy again through the winter season. I had two free weekends with no weddings, so I took the last week of the summer off to spend time with my best friend from college, Kim, and her family in Nantucket. We ate seafood - smoked bluefish (which might be up there with last meals), lobster, white fish (forget the name). I read a book, an actual book. Most of the time when I say I’m reading, I’m actually just listening to an audio book. I played with Kim’s two year old son, Ezra, and he filled my heart with so much joy. Kids are the sweetest, and Ezra might be the coolest two year old I’ve ever met. Zero terrible twos there - I didn’t know that was possible!

Some days I woke up with the sunrise, and worked on my laptop on the deck for a few hours - so, so hard to completely shut off your brain when you own a small business. Other days, I slept in, had breakfast with fam, went on long, long beach walks, a swim in the ocean, sat on the deck to read in the sun for the day, make dinner, read, repeat.

Being on vacation gave me so much time to think, and also so much time to not think. I bought flowers for Kim at Bartlett’s Farm. Sunflowers, because they really have become my new favorite flower this summer - think I started to fall in love with them at the NYC bodegas. I found myself just staring at them, in a daze...often. Kind of like how you stare at the water, the ocean. Now, granted, the flowers were in the most beautiful window with seagrass and the Atlantic Ocean in the background, but still. Even though I work with flowers, I still want to have them in vases around the house. I feel like it’s a way to say, I care about how you feel when you’re in this space. Or it’s a way to say, I care about how I feel in this space. It’s little things like adding flowers to a vase and placing it on the counter or the bedside table, adding pumpkins to the front steps, or hanging wreaths to doors, that just feel special. Making our spaces beautiful truly does something to how we feel inside. If a messy room is a messy head, then a room with flowers is…a more peaceful mind?

It made me wonder about Feng Shui with flowers. I’ve heard before that dried flowers actually are bad feng shui because they give off stagnant energy, the opposite of chi. I have to agree. Unless your dried flowers are intentionally made as an arrangement, then it just feels like a forgotten vase. Even then, why dry? Why not fresh? The vitality from fresh flowers adds depth and positive energy to our spaces. Flow, movement. There’s a latin superstition that my mom told me once years ago when I was about 11 years old — if you want good luck in the New Year, you have to have your house cleaned top to bottom before midnight, to keep things fresh. It’s something I still carry with me today. Another one I have picked up along the years, is to have a bowl of fresh citrus out on New Year’s Eve to welcome in a fresh start to a new year. Intention setting. I have been promoting our Flower Subscriptions lately, and it’s a product that I can truly stand behind because I am a flower subscriber, too. I love to enjoy fresh flowers on the kitchen counter or in my bedroom. I love to notice how they’re doing each day, to see how long they last and to feel impressed by that. I love to notice the color changes or the different stages of blooming. Fresh flowers, to me, are always like turning the light off at the end of the day in the kitchen, a “work is done, the last T is crossed, eye brows just waxed” kind of feeling. Even though we all know that the work, whatever the work, is never really is done, it feels good to feel accomplished in those tiny moments. Flowers remind me to take a pause and calm down for a moment. That no matter what’s happening around me, I am taking the time to enjoy the flowers and simple pleasures that the day presents to me.

I wasn’t ready to head back from my trip on Thursday, which was my initial plan, so I booked a long weekend on the Cape and had even more of the best time. I stayed in between Ptown and Wellfleet, two areas I love so so much and just walked and walked - the beaches, the downtowns, the art galleries. There are so many art galleries. I cooked a lot and did a little bit of work, because it’s kinda unavoidable at times. Went to a Schitt’s Creek drag show - hilarious. When in Ptown, am I right? Highlight was overhearing a shop owner talk about the Oyster and Art Crawl happening that day so I signed up and ate more oysters and saw more art. How many oysters and art is too much? I lost count, and possible that that number doesn’t exist. It rained that day and I was solo and met some of the loveliest people on that crawl. I’ll always order Wellfleet Oysters whenever I see them on the menu from now on.

Also a highlight, walking along a beach in Ptown, Herring Cove I think, and seeing a seal about ten feet from shore. I did go swimming on the first day of my solo trip, in the bay across from my Airbnb. The water was warm and a townie was kinda shocked that I was going in. It was end of September, but Kim approved when we were in Nantucket and she’s a vet and I trust her. Later that day, once I started to visit other beaches, all of them had signs saying that Great White Sharks, in fact, frequent these beaches. I didn’t go in the water after that, and truly couldn’t believe how close the seal was to shore. I’ve never seen that anytime I’ve been on the cape.

I love to be busy, probably love it a little too much, but it felt so good to take a step away and plant myself in another location. Very true when they say that filling up your own cup is how you can be there for others. Feeling inspired and grounded for our wedding this week and I can’t wait to dive into our first fall event of the season. My mom and I were talking the other day about how we have both converted to loving fall more these days. We both used to be the type to never want summer to end, and I’m still kind of in that category but I also feel like if you don’t embrace the season you’re in, you’ll also be missing the past a little bit too much. My mom also said she feels that the fall is romantic, and if you know my mom with her Nicaraguan accent, she sounded so cute while saying it. She also did get married in the fall, but yes, I do agree, fall can be romantic. You’ve Got Mail? Sweetest Day? Making a mental note to post about Sweetest Day this week and offer a fun giveaway or a way for people to order flowers. It’s basically a holiday that’s like Valentine’s Day but celebrates all kinds of love, not just romantic love. It’s celebrated in the midwest, but not so much on the east coast. It would be fun to bring it here!

Colors for this seasons events call for oranges, deep plum and burgundy, always a little bit of pastels in blush and light blue, can’t help myself. I would love to get my hands on porcelain berry, something that you can never really order from a wholesaler. I’ve only seen it growing on a chain link fence on a side street a couple of times. I’m hoping to find it this year. It’s so unusual and so beautiful. Love that it has freckles and the blueish color is so dramatic. And yes, mom - romantic!

I can’t wait to share with you about all of the exciting events coming up this season. We have holiday pop-ups lined up and three more workshops planned with Flat Vernacular - look to the full list of workshops here. We’re working on a table scape for Flat Vernacular’s exhibition in the Designed to Dine event happening at Wee Burn Country Club in Darien on October 25th. And there’s one more event that I can’t wait to share with you, but I’m just waiting for the full details to be confirmed before I do.

Today was one of those beautiful fall days that felt like summer and I somehow managed to sneak in two beach walks today, one in the morning and one after art class. I know I’ll be slammed these next few days so I wanted to savor the warm weather. I saw perennial daisies in bloom, and I keep meaning to mention/ask about everyone’s hydrangeas. It wasn’t a great year for hydrangeas this summer in New England. I have had a few talks with my mom’s cousin, Henry, who also takes care of my parents’ lawn, about their hydrangeas. At the beginning of the season, I thought the plants were dead - they only showed big leafy green leaves with no flowers in bloom. One of their plants had flowers, but the other two, zilch. On my walks, I’ve noticed the same thing. Full hydrangea bushes with no flowers, or some flowers that had pre-maturely aged and became the antique/fall kind in the middle of August. A summer without hydrangeas is not right. Henry said it’s best to give each plant flower food this year - I bought a bag of organic outdoor plant food and poured it on top of each plant. Apparently, because of the very dry summer that we had last year, it stunted growth in the hydrangea for this year. We had so much rain this year, wondering what that will mean for the hydrangeas next year.

Summer Lovin'

September 21, 2023

As we reflect on the Summer months, we can’t help, but to feel an overwhelming amount of love, support, and gratitude.

We traveled to Detroit, Michigan to work the PGA tournament for the 5th year in a row. And it wouldn’t be possible without any of our amazing client’s and team member so thank you to each and every one of you!

Martha took a solo trip to Puerto Rico in July, something she’s always wanted to do after the big job that is the Rocket Mortgage Classic tour, something that takes months and months of planning and execution. Her favorite part of the trip? The beaches and reading magazines! She came back inspired by island and it’s colorful lifestyle, it’s a happy place for her for sure, ready to incorporate it into her own work.

Furthermore, we worked with so many beautiful couples and feel honored to have been chosen to be part of their special day. We connected with members of the community for floral workshops and floral subscription deliveries.

This summer, we also re-launched our Flower Subscription service. For years, we have been calling this service “Weekly Flowers” - so we did a little rebranding. This is a service we have been fulfilling since our early days in business - delivering flowers to businesses and homes in the area. We always have our steady clients that we service, and it’s something that we’ve noticed we don’t really talk about very much! We are excited to share with you that this IS a service we offer, and have been offering, and we hope you sign up!

The weddings and events this summer called for some neutrals but let’s be honest, most of our events have lots and lots of color. Pinks, oranges, bright, wild flower compositions. It was a lot of fun bringing our client’s vision to life! We love it all.

Summer might be over, but we don’t stop! We won’t stop! lol. Make sure to follow along @madefloral. We will have workshops and ideas for bringing the florals and plants indoors very very soon. Until then, treat yourself to that pumpkin spice latte and enjoy the colors of fall roll in.

- Gabriela

Made Floral's 9th Birthday!

August 29, 2023

Made Floral’s very first day in business took place nine years ago with a Flower Workshop at Willy’s Detroit on August 28 in 2014. We celebrated our nine years in business with a very similar style workshop at our studio in Norwalk, Connecticut last week - it was so fun! We sipped rose and made gorgeous seasonal bouquets! All of the flowers used were selected from local farms in Connecticut. The dahlias were to die for! Everyone loved these the most, especially of the colors. Someone described the colors as resembling a sunset, and I agree.

A lot has changed since that first day in business! So many lessons learned, friends made, weddings and events booked, and I am so grateful for it all! Thank you for being part of this journey with me and cheers to the next nine years in business!

What to Expect at our upcoming flower workshops: