I’ve followed Gabriela of La Musa de Las Floras on Instagram for quite a while now, so when I saw she was teaching classes in Sunnyvale, I was very tempted! I’ve never arranged flowers before and am definitely not planning on being a florist, but I love learning new skills. I’m also an avid paper florist, so I figured it would be fun to know how to arrange my flowers, rather than having single stems haphazardly stuck into a vase. Bonus, I would love to be able to arrange them for styled shoots or even for engagement sessions. After watching one of Gabriela’s free online videos, I fell in love with her approach to arrangements and decided I had to take advantage of her being so close. As a result, I am now sharing this La Musa de Las Floras In Person class review with you guys.

Having never arranged flowers before or taken any similar class, I wasn’t exactly sure what to expect. We arrived at a beautiful house in Sunnyvale (I had some major house envy!!) which had a windowsill filled with dozens of types of beautiful flowers. Gabriela started by telling us her approach to floral design and it was immediately clear how passionate she is about flowers. As she put together a sample bouquet, Gabriela taught us how she sees color and how she uses flowers she has already chosen to build a beautiful, soft, but strong color palette. I loved seeing how she used smaller flowers for both texture and transitions between two different colors of larger statement flowers to pull the color palette together.

After Gabriela completed her bouquet, she let us pick our flowers and foliage. As we picked our flowers and foliages, she and her lovely assistants walked around and gave us helpful hints for choosing additional flowers that would help make our bouquets more cohesive.

Then, we all began to assemble our bouquets. As someone who has never arranged flowers before, this style of loose bouquet arranging was particularly difficult. Luckily, Gabriela and her assistants were absolutely amazing and so incredibly helpful. I ended up with a bouquet that I love. Of course, I couldn’t resist taking the bouquet home and photographing it the next day in my wedding dress and hand-sewn cathedral length lace edged veil, haha! Sam woke up in the morning to me walking into our bedroom in my full wedding attire and he barely blinked an eye.

Looking at these photos now, I can see the hole in my bouquet at the right where I let some of my flowers fall down too far! One of the things Gabriela taught us was how to pull flowers to different heights within the bouquet to create a beautiful shape rather than a stiff sphere. I absolutely loved taking this class with her and highly recommend taking an in person class if you get a chance. Of course, Gabriela also has her La Musa de Las Floras online course now, which I am sure is also amazing. That being said, nothing can take the place of having her next to you, helping you build your bouquet! It was an incredible learning experience and I loved taking my bouquet apart a few days later and reassembling it. I still have so much to learn, but I can’t wait to put what I have learned into practice with paper flowers!

I hoped you enjoyed this review of La Musa de Las Floras’ in person class! Gabriela is teaching in Berkeley again in 2019, so if you’re interested, I would definitely sign up!