No one really wants to say goodbye to their wedding bouquet - especially not after all the painstaking planning and money that went into carefully choosing each and every bloom for the floral showstopper that accompanied the bride down the aisle. And after everything that went into creating the wedding bouquet, it's no surprise many couples wonder how to preserve it.
Katy Eccles From Imprint Casts Preserves Wedding Florals
Though there are a lot of ways to preserve your favorite wedding flowers - like pressing the flowers, drying them, casting them in resin - almost none of them are as original as the creations of Katy Eccles, the maker behind Imprint Casts.
Katy Eccles 'casts' from her lovely studio in Fife, Scotland, where most of her botanical casts consist of flowers and foliage hand-picked from her mother's garden. She creates works for exhibitions, bespoke collections for stockists, and also launches seasonal drops on her website. Eccles also offers a popular bridal bouquet casting service and spends most weekends in the summer casting up stunning wedding flowers so couples can preserve their favorite blooms from their special day.
What Started as a Personal Project
Inspired by her mother, who first learned the casting technique on a weekend workshop in London with artist Rachel Dein, Katy became the driving force and creative mind behind Imprint Casts. What started as a personal project to cast her own stunning garden in Fife, has grown arms and legs over the past four years. Imprint Casts, the business, was born from an increasing demand from friends and family for her botanical tiles. Katy took over from her mother in 2020 and now manages all the casting, sales, and marketing, but still needs, according to the artist, 'the nod of approval' from the matriarch before signing off on any cats.
Preserving Wedding Bouquets
Katy Eccles explains that she needs at least 10-15 stems from a wedding bouquet to create a cast. It's preferable to get the whole bouquet intact, but if you want to keep some stems for yourself to dry or press, she pulls the best ones for casting out of the bouquet.
On her website, Katy Eccles says: "My mum is green-fingered and has managed to create a garden of Eden out of a converted cattle shed in our Fife home. So all the technical plant knowledge comes from Mama Sue and a lot of the flowers used for Imprint casts come from our beautiful garden."
More About Katy Eccles
Eccles works from a little barn studio in Fife, which is part of the steading designed by her parents who are both architects, surrounded by the epic garden her mother has created over the past 25 years. You can see and read more about her work on the Imprint Casts website or keep up with her creations and artistic processes on Instagram.
