Flowers for The Hybrid Collective

What is the Hybrid Collective?

The Hybrid Collective is an annual days long event that started in 2016 as a response to film photographers’ frustration with trade shows. Every year, The Hybrid Collective brings top experts in the photography and wedding industries to lecture, teach classes, and host creative sessions. It brings hundreds of photographers (digital and film) together. This year the Hybrid Collective took place at Camp Lucy in Dripping Springs, Texas. Next year it will be in San Diego.

You’re a florist. Why were you there?

The Hybrid Collective offers attendees the opportunity to add creative sessions into their agenda. For each of these sessions, a planner or designer organizes various wedding scenes for the photographers to shoot in order for the photographers to add quality content to their portfolios. It may seem weird to have 25 photographers taking images of the same faux wedding, but their styles and their audiences are usually so different, it doesn’t show awkward in the online space.
Imagine being the florist (me) who suddenly has 25 photographers taking photos and sharing images of her work instead of the usual one photographer!

I’ve always wanted to be involved in the Hybrid Collective but previously, traveling was not feasible. A few months ago, when I realized Hybrid was going to take place near Austin, TX, I looked up the mood boards for the styled wedding shoots and began to reach out to the planners that I admired and whose shoots aligned with the kind of work I enjoy doing.

A traveling event florist?!

I think many would be surprised at how doable it is to travel as an event florist. I’ve prepared for events in above garage apartments, dining rooms with the chandeliers zipped tied out of the way, precarious mountain cabins, friends’ back houses, and studio spaces rented from local florists (my preference by far). Details that take extra time to source and coordinate when I travel for a wedding include travel, lodging, work space, local help, hard good rentals, and product. It’s more work than designing for local events out of my own studio, but I love working through the logistics, discovering new flower sources, and meeting new flower friends. In fact, the most difficult part of traveling for events is preparing our three kids and our home for my absence. This includes meal planning, meal prepping, coordinating childcare with drop offs and pick ups, and leaving detailed instructions for each day to make things as easy as possible without the primary homemaker (me) to coordinate it all.
I should do a separate post series on this.
But on to the good stuff!

I’ve included these photos of my floral designs from the Hybrid Collective at Camp Lucy so that you can see a little of the resulting work. There will be many more.

Organic Opulence

Designer and producer: Detailed Touch Events
Florist: Emily Emily Kaye Floral Atelier
HMU: Melissa B Beauty
Cake: Lilac Sugar Cakes
Rentals: Design to Flourish
Location and Rentals: Camp Lucy
Models: The Block Agency

The following images are by Laura Rose.

House of Gucci

Producer: Type A Society
Gowns: Oscar De La Renta and Elie Saab (pulled by Lauren Martens)
Suit: Friar Tux
Flowers: Emily Kaye Floral Atelier
Cake: Olive and Aries
HMU: Luna Beauty Bridal
Shoes: Gucci
Invitation: The Letterist
Location and Rentals: Camp Lucy
Plates: Christian la Croix Maison

The following photos are by Katrina Mcardle. We met at the end of the session and spoke french together for a few rusty yet glorious minutes. I know this will not be the first time we work together! And I see a rendez-vous in Paris in our future…

Autumn Still Life with Local Flowers

Back in November 2023, at the very end of the local growing season, I collaborated with Monika, owner of the local flower farm Scratch House, to create a few arrangements that would showcase her beautiful flowers. Mums are the common closer when it comes to local farms. Usually the mums are the crop that finishes out the growing season, the flower in bloom when the field is hit by the first frost.

Mums? Meh.

I made sure to hook you with a photo before saying the word “mum” because NO ONE gets excited about mums. They are truly one of the most boring flowers and it’s really our own fault for encouraging horticulturists to keep them so mundane because every fall, we all go out and buy thousands of those perfectly spherical mounds of orange and yellow to go on our porches and in our pumpkin displays.

Mums are not naturally shaped that way.

Heirloom Mums - not your porch mum

At Scratch House Flower, Monika grows a variety of heirloom mums, mums that have a lengthier and purer history, long spidery stems, whimsical formations, larger centers, and a variety of petal shapes and colors. She, along with a rising of other farms, is on a mission to bring these beautiful flowers back into the light, to increase their notoriety, and to establish them as an American grown crop.

MUM? Boring. Basic. Budget—three Bs that are the death of good design. What a fantastic challenge, I thought to myself.
How would I arrange and change this flower into a fairytale princess of blooms?
How could I help people see these flowers in an inspirational light?
To make matters even more difficult, Monika informed me that almost all the flowers available would be orange.
I do not like orange.
And there would be orange marigolds.
What a fabulous design challenge to try to create something you love out of pieces that don’t excite you.

For the Marigolds

The marigolds were so incredible, I had to do an arrangement that showed off their long, bushy stems. Apparently the first crop is typically extra dreamy like this. Oh the things we learn when working directly with the grower!

In some cultures, marigolds are symbolically incorporated into the wedding ceremony design with florists stringing the fluffy blooms together and draping them over the primary ceremony structure (“mandap” in Indian weddings). In light of that, I wired a few of the marigolds together to drape down the front of the arrangement.

For the Heirloom Mums

For the heirloom mums, I wanted to do a design that clustered them in a way that both referenced and rejected the porch mum while drawing attention to its superior qualities (interesting petals, nuanced color, lengthy and curvy stems).

Orange was clearly the dominant color of the day but instead of trying to hide it with another strong color, I partnered the flowers with similarly textured ingredients but more neutral colors. I let the orange of the marigolds shine and tried to draw out more of the pinks in the heirloom mums with some pink toned neutrals. We even experimented with a blush linen.

The photographer Jen Symes is the other hero in this collaboration because our shoot fell on dim, cloudy day yet she successfully transcribing these heavily saturated blooms onto film without feeling garish.

Big thanks also to Nuage Designs, who continues to partner with me in this seasonal still life series. They provided the beautiful linens for the vessels to sit on and we experimented using some of them as backdrops. The quality was fantastic.

If you’re interested in knowing more about the process behind planning a project like this, I go into greater detail on a previous still life project post [read here].
Winter still life in the works and coming soon!

^^^
This arrangement was just for fun using ingredients foraged from around our home and garden. That’s in part what this series is about anyway; playing and finding unexpected joy in the freestyle design. Can you believe the variety in fall colors I managed to find just in our yard?!

Behind the Scenes

I snapped a few images with my phone of the mechanics behind the heirloom mum piece. The base was composed of an intertwining of acorn covered branches which held very steady inside of this particular vessel. I rigged two areas of the branches with small foam cages for that bunched look that I wanted for the false willow (fluffy white stuff) and the upper mum cluster.

The lower middle image shows you the beginnings of the marigold piece for which I experimented with some elevation and base clustering with more heirloom mums.

Sometimes it only looks pretty at the end ;)

Own Your Zone of Genius

Own your zone

The best results come from collaborations in which you let the creatives be the experts in their own “zones of genius” (assuming of course you carefully selected your experts—do your homework!). In a project or a shoot, give your fellow collaborators as many details as possible. They may think of things pertaining to their expertise that you hadn’t thought of that will lead to an even better outcome. You can control the general direction while giving others the freedom to shine in their gift. I find this to be particularly important when working with photographers.

Due to time constraints on the peony shoot this past summer (get the details), we were unable to document the bloom types and we ran out of time to shoot a couple of the linens from Nuage Designs. So, after the shoot in the studio, I took everything to my parents house to attempt my own documentation with my vintage Nikon film camera. I’ve shared a few of my images below.

As you can see, they are not nearly as good as the imagery from the professional photographer, Jennefer Wilson. Actually, by themselves, maybe you would be impressed. But because I started this post with Jennefer’s images, you can see the glaring difference in all around quality. I am not a photographer. I have not been trained to use a camera, I have not put in hundreds of hours practicing, and I do not know how to properly edit. The alternative though in this case was not having any imagery of the individual peonies generously provided by the Alaska Peony Cooperative and not having any documentation of the other linens. So, I decided to try.

I have seen beautiful flower arrangements in real life turn absolutely blah in a photo and very mediocre arrangements appear fabulous because of the skill of the photographer to record them at just the right angle and light.

In the end, I’m glad I recorded the individual peony varieties because those images are good enough for documentation purposes, but the images I took of the arrangements I tossed together for the two linens are probably not going to be shared outside of this post. Still, it was a good reminder for me that I cannot be an expert in everything, as much as I’d like to be. Moreover, we rob others of the joy of their calling if we try to be everything.

Can we afford an expert in every part of our lives that we aren’t ourselves brilliant at? or in areas we don’t have time for? No. That’s for billionaires. The rest of us have to prioritize and choose when/where to spend our limited resources on the experts and when to swallow our pride, do the best we can, and move on. I’m preaching to myself here.

Where do you prioritizing outsourcing in your life? The next expert I want to hire is a house cleaner 🙌🏻

Bisous,

Emily