Beautifully crafted silk flower arrangements, each one unique, created with quality faux flowers, so perfect in every detail that you have to touch them to reveal their secret. Silk Floral Art specializes in bespoke, innovative Silk Wedding Flowers and Silk Flowers for the home and office in York, North Yorkshire, and surrounding areas.

This is actually my 10th year, I mainly do weddings, so there are many wedding flowers, I do also flowers for hotels & restaurants, but not as much as weddings – weddings are the main plain.

Yes, that’s correct. So how it works is that they buy anything for the wedding party and then they rent anything for their venue or the ceremony so that they have all sorts of flowers.

Anything that is involved with flowers for a wedding, it can buttonhole, corsages, Bridesmaid Bouquets, flower girl baskets anything you can name I can do (3:00 check that). Stamp pieces, stands, arches anything that people want for a wedding because there are different types of weddings as well: Mystic weddings, contemporary weddings, classical weddings – so there are different styles of weddings so I just care to what people need. What people do, hot it works.

They look at the part they want to see, I have them show a room – they have a good look at the room on the show room, then we start on the bride's bouquet because everything involves.

What they do is that they will try different bouquets, I have got a good range of different thing to try, and then what I can do is – I have got a good selection of flowers. So, I put together their choice of flowers and then give them an idea of what their bouquet could look like because. 

I start off first with the bouquet, because what happens then is that the rest of the wedding party could evolve from the bouquet, because if it is Ivory roses then you may want to use ivory roses for the buttonholes, you know it all evolves from the bouquet, so that is why I start with the bouquet. 

I do get occasionally people who don't want, they just want flowers for their venue – in that case, I don't start with the bouquet then. 

With silk flowers you are not tied by season, you are not tied by things that disintegrate if this is not good– for example, you have a really hot day the bouquet can start to grim and it is not looking it's best. Also, that way you have a memory of this day that you can keep. You also pick the flower on the week before the wedding, or it can be even earlier than that, so if you are not quite happy with what you wanted it can be changed so on the wedding day you are not disappointed if it isn't what you wanted.

That basically means that the flower can stay alive regardless of the situation.

Of course! Because they are artificial – they are not real, but the pictures you know, do look realistic so when you look at the memory of that day when you look at the wedding photograph, people can't tell if they are real or not.

It was twofold actually; I went to a friend's house and she had an arrangement of flowers on the table. I thought that I really liked that because it was quite a style and it wasn't just some bunch of flowers in a vase and this is why I came to night school. So, I went to night school, I used to be quite artistic, but I was just working in a reception and this is a place where you can't get quite artistic and I wasn't using that sort of talent. And then I was just hooked when I started doing it, it wasn't because of the flowers, it was because it was nice designing something from flowers you know that arrangement could be like quite contemporary or to be a little bit different. The reason I went silk flowers was that when I was in night school, during this course, at Christmas time everyone going to do a Christmas display and I thought really, I don't want to make a Christmas display that can't be outside for Christmas (Because the flowers will die). Since it is quite sad to put bits of dead flowers out so I used artificial flowers.

So, from there I started doing silk floral for agricultural shows, prop fairs and things like that. Then, somebody that I worked with, he was getting married and after his wedding, and two things he was surely disappointed about were that his best man's buttonhole fell apart before the wedding, it basically disintegrated. Then the other thing was that he went to his venue and he didn't like the flowers that their florist had supplied and I just thought it got me there.

So that’s how it started. Once I got the mechanics, I taught myself, of how to put bouquets and stitches together and once I felt competent enough, I went from doing flowers for your home to actually doing flowers for weddings. 

A little more than 70 weddings a year. In fact, another little star there, I have got a couple girls who are getting married in New Zealand, so all of those flowers are getting shipped out to New Zealand. I have another wedding at the end of this month – that they are going to take all the flowers to Italy. I am also working on other weddings at the moment. 

Oh, I don't know about exactly one of your stuff helped set it up, I would say around 6 months.