7petals Nicasio Wedding

My body felt like it had been through a spin cycle of a washing machine. Every muscle ached. I was moving through a fog of - that weird fatigue that leaves you both hyper and exhausted.

The big wedding was over and Max and I were in the home stretch, called "a strike" where everything gets taken apart and packed up. The remains were sorted and   the vehicles were full. I started to pull out and head home. A powerful scent wafting from the backseat made me stop and turn my creaky body around. Some amazing fully blown garden roses sat in a bucket in the back seat perfuming the air. Leftovers from the wedding, the spoils we got to bring home and enjoy another day or two.

The roses were so beautiful. Damn! I'm such a sucker for flowers.

This is the largest event that I've been responsible for to date, together with Max Lampert (my designer co-hort). It necessitated several vans and a crew to pull it off. The venue was a rustic roadhouse in Nicascio, CA. with many little areas around the large property to dress up. The wedding family wanted a more sophisticated but still rustic feel. I had worked with Max (Staging to the Max), staging the bride's mother's home years ago and they expressed complete faith in what we were going to do. Wow. It makes such a difference in having appreciative and grateful recipients.

I didn't have a chance to take any photos from this wedding. Jon is learning my camera and he realized that I would be too busy, so he kindly (what a guy) offered to come shoot some pictures until the professional photographs are available. And also thanks to Dana, Max's partner who carved out time to put his talents to task, Suzanne Shellhart for the addition of some key garden flowers, and our crew, Carol,  Cooper, Nancy, Carol K, and Sandy. And a special thanks to Julie, the chef and total mastermind behind Rancho's special events and her staff. There a a lot of loving hands behind these events.

Here's a few photos Jon took. I will be sharing the professional ones later.

This is a practice run for a vignette we are setting in the the entry 

 Installing the vignette

 

  

 

 

 

A Gourd Palace

An old friend from Baltimore just left after visiting with us for a week, Doug Retzler.
http://www.artandeffects.com/

We both attended a private Fine Arts College in Baltimore now called MICA. What do people do with a Fine Arts Education? Mine traversed from photography to illustration, to flowers to many, many years of painting, and back to flowers (the constant was nature and flowers as subject matter).

Doug went from still photography to working on special effects in film (creating rain, wind, fog.... etc.-  no blowing things up, thank you) and creating large scale art events that everyone can participate in.  His intention and hope is to empower people to make art and to educate them on environmental and cultural topics while having fun. 

Baltimore is not Berkeley on the  
Green Richter Scale and his work is especially relevant there. He especially likes to work with kids who have not been given a lot of opportunities to make art or know where a tomato comes from or who can't wrap their minds around the fact that parks belong to them.

Here's an example of one of my favorite projects, THE GOURD PALACE.

 

Doug finds the site and community/school to work with. He designs the structure and builds it with with some helpers out of bamboo, reinforced with rebar (all this plant material is heavy). The participants learn about the ancient culture of growing gourds, then plant a bunch of varieties from seed. When they big enough, they transplant them to the base of the Gourd Palace.

 

 When the vines take off and grow they need training up the palace walls.

Here's the Palace all grow in. I'm admonishing Doug to get some better photos on his site. These are truly magical, fantastic structures.