Blooms, Bubbles & Barely-Held-Together Sanity: Turning Wedding Bouquets into Forever Tables
There’s something properly magical about taking a wedding bouquet, all that colour, texture and meaning and trapping it in resin so someone can touch that moment forever. Then there’s everything that happens in between “They said yes!” and “Here’s your finished table.” Spoiler: it involves an alarming amount of silica gel, Cassie with labels in her hair, and a level of tense flower arranging that should probably be illegal!
The drying dilemma (and why not all silica gel is created equal)
We’ve learned the hard way that drying flowers is 90% patience and 10% temper tantrum. Some blooms dry like absolute champs and look just as delicate and beautiful as the day they were picked. Others? They go from gorgeous to shrivelled like they’ve aged 20 years overnight and no amount of skin care would help!
And no... Not all silica gel is created equal. There’s bargain silica gel that’ll leave your roses looking like sad little raisins, and then there’s the good stuff that actually preserves shape and colour, and it took us ages to find the perfect one! We have drying boxes everywhere now too... In the workshop, in the car, on the kitchen table (sorry kids you're eating on your knees again!). Cassie has a label addiction and can often be found with sticky labels stuck in her hair and other places after a long session of labelling drying boxes and trinkets. It’s peak pro behaviour and also very funny to watch! But at least it gives her a break from being covered in resin...
Finding the perfect live edge; because it matters
When a bride hands over her bouquet, she’s not just giving us flowers; she’s trusting us with a memory that cannot be replaced. Since these tables show the wood edges, the live edge needs to be perfect. We spend stupid amounts of time hunting for the right piece. The grain, the curve, the knot that somehow ties the whole thing together (Yes, pun intended!)
The right live edge is nature's version of perfection. Pick the wrong slab and you’ve got a beautiful floral story sitting on a boring, confusing chunk of wood. Pick the right one and everyone gasps. We’re always picky about this because it needs to be right for the size and type of flowers going into the table. No compromises.
Bubble battles: Resin’s favourite hobby
Resin is more of a diva than any bride. Ever. One day it behaves, the next day it decides to host Bubble Idol. We fight bubbles like it’s our job (because it is). Heat gun, torch, breath held until our faces go purple at this point, it's whatever works best. Sometimes we pour three millimetres and still have a thousand tiny pockets of air whispering “hello” in the corner. We remove it, curse, pour the next round, exhale, and sit down to drink tea just to try and recoup whatever sanity we can.
There’s a weird quiet satisfaction when you finally get a flawless, bubble free resin pour. It’s like winning a small, sticky war!
Arranging: the delicate art of wanting to murder someone
Here’s the bit that will make other makers nod solemnly: when you start arranging the dried flowers in the table, everything shifts. You put one stem in and another five move like they’re plotting against you. You try to fix one thing and the whole design collapses into chaos. At that point you get very close to murdering something... Usually my work bench with a screwdriver! Then I rage, breathe, sip coffee, and it somehow it all comes together.
That tension is part of the process. We grumble, we swear, we glue tiny petals back in place, and then we step back and the arrangement makes someone cry when they see it. Worth it? Every single time.
Brides, bouquets, and why we never get bored!
No two brides choose the same flowers. A vintage bride who has dried lavender and dusty blues will give us a completely different challenge to a ecstatic bride who chose bold peonies and riotous greenery. That variety is the best part! It keeps our brains guessing and our hands learning new ways to arrange, dry and preserve.
We love when brides tell us the story behind a bloom. The same roses as the ones on Grandma’s rose bush she remembered from being little, the same flowers he bought her on their first-date, or the favourite flower of a relative that passed away. Those little stories are what make the job feel like a privilege rather than a job.
It’s pressure! And the biggest privilege!
Working on wedding bouquet tables comes with a fair amount of pressure. These pieces are not just furniture; they’re memories made to last forever. We treat every flower like a tiny sacred artifact. There’s a responsibility to make sure nothing happens to the bouquets we're sent, they cannot be replaced or replicated.
So sure, the pressure is real and we might stress, swear, and hover over the flowers and resin like anxious parents, but when it all comes together, the bubbles banished, petals perfect it’s absolutely worth every stressful minute! And it truly is a privilege in the most nerve-wracking, brilliant way. We get to preserve someone’s love story. We get to be the ones that make a small part of their day a permanent visual memory.
Final thoughts...
We might moan about humidity, dying flowers that refuse to cooperate, and stubborn bubbles that show up for no reason. Cassie might still have sticky labels in her hair. We might want to murder a handful of things at various points. But then we finish a table, hand it over, and read people's reactions and reviews. It makes every stressful minute feel completely worth it.
If you’re thinking about turning your bouquet into a table, bring us the story. We’ll bring the patience, the resin tantrums, and the best slab of wood we can find. And we’ll try not to murder the workbench in the process... Because quite frankly, i don't want to have to build a new one...