Lilywinkel

My Grammy has always been the quaintest little person. My siblings and I have visited her house for as long as I can remember; she has delft in the kitchen and blue glass bottles on the windowsill. As little people, if we were good, we were allowed to sleep in the "Pansy bedroom," where yellow and purple faerie faces twinkled down from pansy-garden wallpaper. Grammy loved old fashioned gardens, tea time, and making perfect cakes that keep their shape even at Denver's altitude.

A true Dutch girl, she has flowers in her blood. She had been a florist for 30 years before I even knew what a peony was. When she was out of a job in the summer of 2010 and was in need of something fulfilling and enjoyable to occupy her time, I thought that perhaps we could work together making and selling her beautiful bouquets. She had already crafted beautiful, bountiful flower arrangements for my little sister's wedding, and she had taught me how to wire a leaf, structure an arrangement, and fill in with just the right touch of such and such. It seemed like the perfect idea.

Our business started out slowly, with just five silk bouquets in our shop. Since then, our little lily-winkel has grown to hold a plethora of colors, sizes, and styles of bouquets, and we have shipped flowers all over the US, and frequently to international locations. Every time I give Grammy our next order to create, she wants to know where the bride is getting married. She's tickled that her bouquets have gone to places like Holland, Australia, France, Canada, England, and New Zealand. Sometimes she includes an extra little touch in these orders, like a mini bouquet for the flower girl, made out of the buds and scraps from other larger flowers.

I (Annie) am the one who answers the emails and lines up the orders. I work with each bride to figure out what her style is, and send photos and flowers back and forth until she decides that we have found the perfect combination for her bouquets! Then, Grammy and I will meet at the flower shop, and we'll pick out the flowers together, almost squealing when we find just the right flower, and mutually disagreeing when something just doesn't go. After that, Grammy will take the flowers home to her basement flower studio, and begin snipping and wiring and grouping together each element of the bouquet. When the bouquets are just right and have been wired, taped, and be-ribboned, she'll give them to me to carefully box and pad them for their ride to the bride's home or wedding destination.

We look forward to making many more wedding flower dreams come true.