Paper Flower Centerpieces - Sing for Hope Benefit Gala 2012

As I was strolling through Pinterest just now it occurred to me that I never posted photos from one of my latest projects, the glowing paper flower centerpieces that I designed, with my new business partner Elizabeth, for the 2012 Sing for Hope Benefit Gala at Guastavinos here in New York City.

Sing for Hope is a non-profit located here in New York which makes the arts accessible to all, and they have started a tradition of having an artist make a special custom centerpiece, instead of using traditional flowers.  The director of Sing for Hope spotted our work during our second Fab.com sale, and immediately got in touch to see if we could somehow transform our Sheet Music Artichoke Pendant into a centerpiece.  I was instantly inspired, and had the idea to tweak the standard artichoke design by changing the size of the circles I used, and creating shapes that were more reminiscent of lotus flowers than artichokes.

Elizabeth and I worked together on the designs, and decided that each table should feature a trio of flowers, created using three sizes of lanterns and featuring repurposed old sheet music as the paper medium.  Each large 8 inch flower was essentially the same, though we added different types of leaves at the end which made them each unique.  The medium 6 inch flowers were pretty similar to the 8 inch ones, but had a few small tweaks to make them a bit more unique, we had maybe 4 different styles for those.  Then for the small 4 inch flowers we really played around with the concept and created as many different designs as we could.  Personally I found the 4 inch flowers the most fun to create because we were always trying new designs and there were no mistakes, just sometimes there were versions that ended up being unique one of a kind pieces.

We found a small string of LED lights powered by a battery pack so each centerpiece was connected to one strand of lights and glowed warmly on the tables.  With the purple table clothes they really stood out beautifully, especially after dinner when they changed the lights in the room to blue and purple hues.

Although we were commissioned to create centerpieces just for the upstairs dining tables, we ended up having extras so we set them up downstairs in the cocktail hour area that was later used for the after party.  It was this really fun and unexpected space where we were able to create different unforeseen clusters on small hightop tables or long coffee tables.  And the black tablecloths really offset the lanterns nicely.

This event also inspired us to really think about how we could use our designs in less traditional ways, and we are now totally excited to try and create centerpieces for other events, and possibly even weddings!  It has just been such a great chance to explore something neither of us ever thought about before.

I hope you like these centerpieces as much as we do!  All photos from the Gala (except the one with the very blue lighting which I snapped with my iPhone) were taken by Allan Zepeda an amazing wedding and event photographer.

Ciao!  Allison

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