I have just finished styling a ball in a marquee and it was all so beautiful and exciting I just had to share. I was honoured to be asked to come up with the concept for our summer ball at my children’s school Holmewood House in Kent. It is set in 32 acres of beautiful Kent countryside so the setting is already magical, but we needed to make the marquee as beautiful as its surroundings.
I turned to pinterest for our starting point to gather some general ideas. I love pinterest for its variety and DIY tutorials. I soon settled on a green and white theme. Budget was important, and very small – as it was a fundraiser for charity, Holding on, Letting go. who do amazing work supporting young people who have experienced bereavement.
Here are my final mood boards. As I work full time they aren’t as polished as I would like but gave the committee a feel for the styling ideas. All images are from pinterest and can be found on the board here to credit all photography. We have tried to credit as many as possible.
I really wanted to have an overhead floral stament piece to tie the whole look togther and we settled on creating some garlands made of ivy that we had foraged. We made these using a 5mm wide rope and simply tied the ivy onto it in a random way to keep it quite natural looking.
For our table centre pieces, we wanted to have longevity and not throw away hundreds of flowers as we had 23 tables to fill. We were extremely lucky that I was introduced to the very lovely Lucinda who works for Sussex Country Garden Centre. She happened to be an expert stylist in table design and was kind enough to donate all the herbs we used for the centre pieces. It was Lucinda’s fab idea to use vintage bottles for stems of flowers across the tables to compliment the herbs and she supplied the flowers, whilst my wonderful mum supplied the vases.
We also worked with a new florist in our home town The Bloom Foundry who supplied the flower arch and flowers for the bar to keep everything looking floral and spring like in our colour palette of green and white.
Last minute I decided to decorate a floral arch to really make an entrance to the ball. This was easily achieved with all of the ivy we had foraged from the school. I just used wire to tie the Ivy in and then popped the gypsophilia in an ad-hoc fashion. The photos below show the work in progress should you want to recreate this yourself.
Lastly, we added 3 neon lights that we hire out to add some rock and roll to this quaint beautiful scene…I particularly loved putting our ‘We should hang something cool here’ by the cloak room ))
The final look…
