Floral Panel Projects

Welcome back. I'm in our cluttered basement, real life situation here. I wanted to share with you today these panels that I make and that I keep in storage for the purpose of building floral walls and hanging chandeliers and different things like that. The winter time is a time when I am typically tasked with thinking about quotes for larger projects, installation projects. Maybe you're thinking about some of these kinds of projects yourself.

So I wanted to give you a few tips for how to bite off these bigger ticket items because they're not as scary as they might seem. My first suggestion is to break everything down into small bits, small digestible bites, both for you and perhaps for your buyer as well.

These panels are constructed of one by four lumber. They were made before I knew much about putting lumber together. You can see I used staples here because that's what I had on hand, really heavy duty construction staples and they work fine.

 I built some corner braces in to make sure that I was able to maintain 90 degree angles and these panels are lined on both sides with chicken wire. 

And they are stuffed with lots of dried materials to hold onto the flowers and greenery that we use in them. These panels can be lined up one after the other for one wider wall. I think my wall measures 12 feet wide by 10 feet tall if I put them all together. I can use one or two. by themselves. You can also make these panels, any shape that you want.

I have a couple that are triangular shaped that I used for a dried floral wall installation. They're so fun. This center one was used to make a hanging chandelier at one point. So I repurposed it. We put hooks on one side and it was hung from a tent to make a hanging chandelier that was a big presence over the dance floor.

Those clients still mention that piece whenever they order flowers for me today. So that was really fun to do.

Some things to keep in mind if you're doing this kind of project: you want to look up the lumber and the cost of the chicken wire. You'll want to consider any tools that you might need to put them together.

I used a chop saw and a the heavy duty staple gun. You might want to use a nail gun or some screws. There's time and labor that goes into it as well, but it's not as crazy as you might think.

And if you're using them for a flower wall in a situation where there may be some light daylight or artificial light coming from the backside of the wall, you're going to want to make sure that you paper over the back of the wall.

This is all pretty sustainable project. There's no floral foam in here. Just lots of like greenery and twigs and stuff inside to grab your branches and your flowers. I suggest putting some craft paper on the back and that way there won't be any light coming through and you won't be fighting all of those cracks and specks of light coming through your flower wall.

So simple. You can order the paper as wide as your panel. These panels are four feet wide. So I just paper over one side like this. almost like wrapping paper, but with craft paper. You can tape it on or staple it on and that's a huge time saver for you and material saver too— because you don't have to use as many flowers to cover all those little tiny spots.

Let's see, I'll show you a couple of photos now of these in action. One is of a flower wall that we built for a wedding. It was installed in a tent and it was late October. It was very cold.  It actually snowed at the wedding. So the elements that we used in that wall are lots of like evergreen materials, lots of textural fall  things.

And then here are some views of the chandelier piece that we made that we hung horizontally from a tent over the dance floor and then here are some images of the triangular panels installed with a dried floral design this was like a surprise community project for fun and we just popped it up in this large empty sign frame at a vacant motel for people to wonder about. Those were all fun things.  Let me know if you have any questions.

I love big projects like these. When it comes time to figure out how many flowers or how much greenery you need to use, break your space down into manageable bites. Instead of trying to figure out how many flowers or greens you need for the whole wall, that could be totally overwhelming, think about just one square foot or 10 inches by 10 inches.

That's a lot easier probably for you to picture. If you've worked with flowers for a couple of seasons and you know about the size and shape of a zinnia or dahlia, or whatever types of flowers you plan to use in there, you can much more easily predict how many flowers and how many greens you're going to need to fill that space to make sure that you're providing a fair estimate. -But also a quote that is going to protect you.

You don't want to under charge for a big project like this. And then I would definitely, tack on a little bit extra to make sure that you cover your bases.

And always, if you can, use some base layers of things that are very readily available and inexpensive for you to use if you have your own property. Maybe that's some greenery that is growing in abundance on your property that can be used as a base layer to really get things going. You and then start to fill in the other more special elements.

All right, everybody, I hope that you're doing well. I'm going to talk to you again soon. Get out of this super unflattering fluorescent light down here in the grow space and storage room. Bye.