Emma & Bradley | Silverton, Oregon
Emma and I met while working on a vineyard one summer. It was a Covid summer, our faces were covered in masks and we didn’t see the bottom halves of each other’s faces until a few weeks later. After a few long hot days of pouring wine for customers, we were taking a break in the AC when we realized we were cut from almost the same cloth. We bonded over our similar childhoods, instantly understanding massive pieces of each other, and finding solace in our instant friendship while the world was going through a strange period of isolation.
When Emma met Bradley a year or so later, I could instantly tell, even before meeting him, that her joy and heart would be protected.
Creating florals for Emma and Bradley’s wedding was a unique experience that I’ll never be able to replicate. We clipped a few select blooms from her garden and spent the day creating flowers in her mom’s home, with family members popping in and out as they gathered to celebrate E & B. After a day of designing, we went out to dinner with her siblings and their partners, shared stories, and wound up back at E & B’s home where we opened a bottle of wine from the hill we met on, spent a few hours working on wedding crafts, while the boys loudly laughed, played games and flipped records.
Oftentimes weddings and the days leading up feel like a rushed flurry. Emma & Bradley’s felt like a little bottle of joy, filled with the steadiness of Emma and the excited wonder of Bradley. Spending time with her family while designing Emma’s flowers was the perfect kind of fuel to feed the design process. Normally we design in our own studio, but with our travel schedule surrounding Emma’s wedding, Emma’s mom welcomed us into her home enveloping Aaron and I into the family for a few days.
Creating for a friend is always such a special experience, but creating for a friend while her family hangs out, took all of the isolating feels we sometimes catch while designing out of the equation. Weddings, to me, are all about community and expanding the circle of people you can rely on - and that is exactly what was felt when we were welcomed into the marriage of Emma and Bradley.
