Courtney Creativebug Welcomes Studio Choo
Studio Choo‘s wild and romantic sensibilities will leave you dreaming of the life of a floral designer and (warning) make you itch for a career change. However, it’s not all rose petals and ribbons; behind the scenes these two women haul sloshing buckets of water, harvest roadside flora and get their hands dirty…in addition to creating crazy-awesome wild blooms and native plant arrangements that go far beyond just “pretty.”
We’re so excited to welcome Alethea Harampolis and Jill Rizzo of Studio Choo to the Creativebug site. We love their fresh-from-the-garden style and approach to floral design. If you’ve never seen one of their arrangements, imagine a Dutch still life painting that you can touch and smell. Using local flowers and greenery, Studio Choo designs with a “flower recipe” in mind. Their signature look showcases several focal flowers, supporting florals, and finally a gestural element that gives their arrangements movement and their signature natural style. Alethea likes to say they create arrangements that look like, “a little garden growing out of a vase.” She’s right — a Studio Choo arrangement is like a little slice of Mother Nature, all dressed up.
We’re serving up three workshops with Studio Choo this month:
- Learn the basics of floral arranging and working with winter flowers and greens.
- Create a unique a beautiful centerpiece arrangement just in time for your holiday dinners using Studio Choo’s signature recipe.
- Move on to create a winter wreath using a variety of greens and textural elements and finish up your winter arranging with a garland created on a found branch.
Jill and Alethea visit the SF Flower Mart several times a week to select the season’s best for their arrangements.
Alethea enjoying the scent of these garden roses.
As a child, Alethea used to crush flowers and make perfumes she sold to people on the side of the road in Australia. Now she’s working on a new line of scents under the name Snakeface Apothecary which lives at the new Studio Choo workspace.