A Perfect Bloom in Time

Liz Carter has mastered the art of the bouquet. Each of her flowers is a perfect bloom, with not a petal out of place. They are artfully arranged. And they are guaranteed to never die. 

Fatigued by the impermanence of fresh-cut flowers, the longtime florist and lifelong nature-lover founded Unwilted, a company that offers realistic, sustainably made paper bouquets.

Each bloom is made with Forest Sustainability Council-certified Italian crepe paper that is dyed with non-toxic inks. Liz and her two-person team cut the paper by hand and delicately fold and glue it to realistically resemble peonies, poppies, carnations, daisies, and more. Customers can buy single stems or bouquets, all shipped in plastic-free, carbon-neutral packaging.

We caught up with Liz to learn more about her inspiration and the process of making a flower one fold at a time.

The following Q&A has been condensed and edited for clarity.

Emily Cain: You owned a flower shop before Unwilted. Can you tell me a bit more about that? What led you to working with flowers and opening up that shop?

Liz Carter: Well, I actually ended up purchasing a shop that already existed. And before that, I had worked in a different flower shop, just kind of helping as holiday help. As you can imagine, for Valentine’s Day, the need for the extra hands to sort roses, it increases. 

I had just moved to Boulder, Colorado, and I picked up some random hours to make a little bit of money and maybe meet some new people. And it turns out I just love dealing with flowers. I just thought it was beautiful, and I loved the process of it, of seeing something come in and be processed to a point where it’s going out beautifully in this arrangement.

And then I ended up buying a different flower shop and growing that to several locations, but it’s just really exhausting. Working with things that are perishable, there’s a lot more backend planning that you have to think about. 

EC: What sort of challenges did you run into? 

LC: I can remember one time I walked into my store and the cooler had frozen, so all the flowers were just in ice. So scary! Like, what do you do, you know? It’s like you’re selling lettuce. 

So, anyway, I did that for close to 12 years, and it just is fairly exhausting. I grew up in Michigan, and my parents were getting a little older, so I ended up moving home. 

In the meantime, I discovered Italian crepe paper, and it’s made for making flowers. This paper is produced with the intention for it to be sculpted, manipulated. It’s very stretchy. It holds a bend and is able to accept a lot of different mediums, like paints or pastels, gluing.

Other people will use it for creating bugs, plants, birds, trees, feathers — things that mimic the natural world. There is even a paper artist who uses this paper to do re-creations of food.

When I discovered the world of crepe paper flowers, I fell in love because I was like, well, this means I can make flowers exactly how I want them versus the waiting process of growing seasonality. I could be a florist without the perishability.

EC: Besides the struggle of working with perishables, is there anything else that inspired the shift from working with live florals to constructing your own?

LC: I wanna say it was like a creative moment once I had the idea. Once I found this paper and I realized I could make the flowers exactly how I wanted them, it was kind of like bam, bam, bam.

You can always have a bouquet exactly how you want it. In the world of fresh flowers, you have to get flowers a certain amount of time ahead of time in order for them to bloom to perfection to sell them. With paper flowers, you don’t have to wait. You can construct them into that perfect moment.

EC: What’s been the most rewarding thing that has come from working with handmade florals?

LC: It’s been really rewarding because there’s a lot of circumstances where people gift flowers. “Flowers are a gift of emotion” is sort of my tagline, but it’s true. And so it’s nice that you can give something that mimics or evokes that sentiment but still lasts. It is this long-lasting representation of that moment. 

EC: Any struggles?

LC: I realized paper flowers aren’t for everyone. Even when I was a fresh florist, I had a hard time with faux flowers just because I had a bit of a ‘Well, it’s not the real thing’ mindset. But I think there is a little bit of sunshine for everyone in the world. When I discovered this, it changed my mind in a way because they are preserving that sentiment, and it is a nice gift. And also, who doesn’t love peonies? But peony season is so short.

The reality then strikes when a lot of the times the beauty of fresh flowers are those teeny tiny details. Like the tiny wisp of Queen Anne’s Lace or the tendril of some sort of Scabiosa pod. With paper, you have to sculpt all of that. That’s why you see a lot of the Unwilted flowers leaning heavily toward these big blooms. You’re gonna get the impact of that bloom in a bigger way. 

Don’t get me wrong; I appreciate teeny tiny details on every flower, and we strive for that realistic look. But in terms of the grasses and the little details in flowers, it is a little harder to get that in paper.

EC: I do imagine that handcrafting a flower from scratch, from just a sheet of paper, you get to notice these little details of flowers that the average flower lover or artist might not notice, even if you are working on a big fluffy peony. Is there anything you’ve noticed about some blooms that you otherwise might not have?

LC: The details that I noticed are the space between the flowers, and the space between the petals, and the space between the leaves. When you see a flower, you’re just looking at a flower, right? But the flowers consist of all of the space within. If you took all the petals of a peony and smashed them down together, it wouldn’t be a peony.

The tiny details within the flower also equal the complexity of the structure that holds it to create the space within it, too. So it’s almost like you’re taking something that’s flat to round. In nature, it’s easy to do because it’s what nature does, it’s its job.

When you’re taking paper, when you’re cutting something out, you’re also considering, ‘Where do I place this on the stem to give that illusion within time and space that it’s at the same angle that the flower would be at?’ 

You’re also considering construction. When I met my now husband, he asked what I do, and I was like, ‘I have this company…’ And he was like, ‘Oh, so you’re like a flower engineer.’ And it’s sorta true, right? I have to think about all parts of the flower. Within Unwilted, I also try to think about what I can eliminate in order to keep it as simple as it can be for manufacturing, but as complex as it needs to be to look realistic.

EC: I’m curious about the process. How do you go from just the sheet of paper to this perfect bloom, and how long does that take?

LC: It depends on the flower. I try to design my flowers so that I use as much of the paper as possible. The paper is an 8 foot roll that’s 20 inches high.

It’s almost like fabric. So one way, it’ll really stretch, and another way, it will not at all. That being said, you have to think about your petals and leaves in terms of how you want that grain to go because the stretch of the paper only goes one way. 

I feel like it takes trial and error, and then you just kind of have to think about where you want the curve to be and use your paper accordingly.

At this point, I feel like I have the process down pat. I wanna say it’s like sewing — thanks, Grandma! Once you figure out a few rules of it, you’re like, ‘OK, if I do it like this, then it’ll be on the bias.’ The same way I’m gluing my leaves so that the grain of the paper looks like the pattern on the leaf. Once you get a few of the main tactics down, if you really trust your imagination, you can get pretty far.

And then it just becomes, ‘How thick do I want this to be?’ Because if you don’t stretch some of the paper, you still can use it a certain way within that structure. So, the interior of our daffodils right now is a 90-gram paper, which is really, really fine paper, but it stretches like 500%. So, we don’t stretch it when making the inner throat of the daffodil. Only when we go to ship the petal and do our final sculpting do we finally stretch the outside of it, because then it’ll give that fluted edge, but it can’t go back.

So once you know where you want the texture to be, you can decide the texture you want based on the paper you’re gonna use, and then you just have to be really careful. If you stretch it too much, you gotta start over. 

EC: It shows complete mastery of the medium and also the flowers that you’re re-creating. It’s impressive! I read a little bit on your website about your childhood playing in your grandmother’s garden and your childhood in Michigan. I’d love to hear more about that. Are there any stories or memories that stick out to you of that time that maybe inspired you to work with florals? 

LC: It’s hard to extract just one. My grandma was a master gardener and came from a long line of people who would take their time to do, I don’t wanna say experiments, but for example, her father was a botanist, and he would play in his garden and graft plants together. And so I think that came from her, this kind of exceeding patience with the creation of something. 

And she was also really crafty before ‘crafty’ was a thing. If I needed something sewn, she knew how to sew it. I needed a costume? Bam. What color? I mean, she would create cookbooks out of all the scrap books, things she pulled out of magazines, for me. Like, she just was a very care-taking woman like that. 

There was one time specifically with flowers. I’d owned my flower shop for a little bit, and I was bragging to her about all the different flowers we get. I was telling her about the poppies because I know she loves them. And she was like, ‘Well, I don’t grow those kind.’ She was kind of pushing back on me, and I was like, ‘Well, what kind do you grow, Grandma?’ Mind you, she was, like, 87 at this time. And she goes, ‘Oh, the opium ones…’ 

She just has this kind of cheeky way about her. She was kind of that entire generational force from that side of my family. 

And there was one time she did manage to come to visit my flower shop, and she was so cute. Opening all the boxes that we got from our wholesaler in the morning, she was like, ‘It’s like Christmas!’ 

EC: Do you see any subtle ways that your grandma shows up in your work, whether you’re using some of her favorite flowers or any advice that she gave you?

LC: She was a pretty good gardener because she was patient. She also was a pretty good gardener because she would just let things grow. She used to call it ‘encouraging her volunteers.’

In her generation, sometimes they would bury their scraps. Like composting now, but way more chaotic. She would be like, ‘Oh, look at that volunteer. It must have been a squash!’ or something like that that popped up from her scraps. And she would let it grow and let it keep growing. 

Her garden, even though she had painstakingly put in these plots exactly the size she wanted, was huge. It was half of her yard. It was just wild with all of her trash that was growing. 

It is really sweet if you think about it in a way because it’s like a lot of times in life and a lot of times in business, you just don’t know what’s gonna pop up. And if you stick to the plan that you had, you might not find out, like, ‘Hey, I also can grow watermelon!’

That may be a little cheesy, but it’s funny when you start thinking about where you come from and how it influences your day to day. Like how often things do pop up, you know?

EC: I’m curious what your favorite flower is, and if that’s different from your favorite flower to make.

LC: Oh, you can’t make me choose! They would know. The flowers would know. 

EC: Like choosing your favorite child.

LC: Yeah. I only have one kid and I still can’t pick! It’s dependent on different times. Different seasons. Different appreciations in certain times. Like blooming branches. I love blooming branches, but I love blooming branches in the spring for certain reasons, and then there’s blooming branches in the winter for others. I can’t pick. 

I love the texture of flowers a lot, too. There are times where I’m like, ‘I just want a big thing of hydrangeas.’ And then there are times where it’s like, ‘No, no, a few grasses is all you need in that corner.’ 

I mean, there are certain flowers I love making more than others just because they’re fun and I can whip them out. But I don’t know, there’s something about really getting down in the very beginning and discovering how a flower can be constructed out of paper, and that’s not at all whipping it out. That’s weeks of research and throwing something at the wall, seeing what sticks, you know? And that’s just as enjoyable. I don’t have to do it as much, but it’s still fun. 

EC: Is there something that you hope your work sparks in customers beyond what they feel when receiving any other flower or bouquet?

LC: I mean, one thing I definitely appreciated when I was a fresh florist was the work that I was doing. It felt really nice to kind of paint with flowers. Now, I’m actually literally painting flowers sometimes.

I have a different, great attitude of appreciation toward it because this is something people are going out of their way to send — a gift that is from a small business and completely new. It’s a direct to consumer, full delivery of flowers. I mean, I don’t know too many companies that are out there doing it, and I don’t know of any other paper florists that are doing it to this inventory level that I have. 

It’s wild to me, and I’m so grateful that I’ve been able to create a product that feels as realistic for the value that people are willing to say, ‘Yeah, I see the value in this gift, not only because it looks like flowers and I would be sending flowers anyway, but because of the they look so realistic, and they’re so beautiful.’

And, I’m not on Amazon. It’s me, and I have a handful of consultants. I have two employees. Sometimes I take my daughter with me to work. But I’m a small business, Midwest-based, woman-owned — all the things you’d scramble around to put on your website and scream from the rooftops, but the product stands for itself.

I think that it’s really exciting and wild to me that other people see the value in it and are willing to try this alternative.