Artificial flowers at weddings are nothing new. Though fake flowers will never match the splendour of real blooms with real fragrant scents and real shapely petals, there is a time and a place for things which look like they might be flowers, but aren’t really.
On a wedding cake, for example.
Sugarspun flowers have long been a popular adornment for a wedding cake. The reasoning is obvious; you want to capture the beauty of a floral aesthetic, but you can’t use real flowers because, sadly, they’ll probably wilt and droop when you tyr to pin them in the soggy cake dough. But now, one artist in Tennessee, USA, is bringing a new angle to the art of creating fake flowers for weddings: flowers made from milk cartons and bits of old wire.
Lauren Karnitz is the aritst’s name. She specialises in creating flowers from what to anyone else, would be bits of old junks: straws and detergent bottles, pencil shavings and leftover plastic.
She explains that the aim is to create a product that doesn’t look ‘recycled’:
“This is plastic as in, ‘Aha, that’s plastic!’, as opposed to looking like plastics or recycled art,”
“The blooms are all built petal by petal, working in the round, so all sides are considered,” Karnitz says. “Each petal provides a surface for the next, and so on and so on.”
“It’s funny. Every time I go somewhere I get handed bags of things,” Karnitz says. “Like garbage bags of milk jugs or, here’s some little wires and stuff.”
None of Karnitz’ creation involve paint or dye: she uses the colours of the materials which she uses, although you’d never know it to look at her inspired arts-n-crafts style creations.
“’Can I have that?’ is now my signature phrase,” she says. “Meaning, can I have that peculiar piece of plastic you are about to toss?”
Credit for all photos goes to Lauren Karnitz studio.
