Lei Love
- Lei Lupea
- Jun 24
- 5 min read
Late nights, cramped hands, and buckets of flowers
For a lei maker, graduation season in Hawai'i is a time of joyful creation and deep exhaustion. I sense the inundation of requests coming and I can prepare as much as possible, but one moment I'm checking on my flower orders and the next I’m surrounded by buckets of blooms, waterfalls of raffia, and a growing list of names, each one a family and a story.
This year’s season felt especially full. Full of orders, yes, but also full of special moments: the excitement of creating beautiful and meaningful lei, the joy of opening each box of delivered flowers, my dogs sleeping next to me while I worked late into the night in my studio, and even my cramping hands near the end of the flood of orders.
Stepping into the chaos
When people see a finished lei, they often see only the beauty of the final moment. What they don’t see is the work that leads to the finished lei.
This year, I started planning early and I wanted to make sure I solidified my order deadlines and figure out how many lei my two hands can realistically create. Spoiler alert: it was way more than I thought I was capable of making. What really saved me this year was planning ahead, strategic ordering, and making as much lei ahead as possible. For example, before graduation season, I wanted to see how long I could reasonably store certain types of lei. I did a test run of several types of lei and figured out their max storage capacity. Unfortunately, there was a limit to my ability to store more than 40 lei at a time, so I did have to be strategic and ended up doing a lot of lei tetris in the fridge. There’s a kind of quiet math behind it all, how many flowers, how many hours, how much energy. Somewhere in there, I’m making peace with the fact that I can’t say yes to everyone, even when my heart wants to.
The language of flowers and hands
Each graduation lei I made was personal.
Some are simple, with little special touches like a ti rose or a little bit of hinahina. Others are outrageous and lush, like the bombucha carnation, a super celebratory lei; everyone sees you coming in that one. I find myself thinking about each person as I work: What colors will they gravitate toward? What will this lei smell like when they’re standing in the hot sun being greeted by friends and family when they walk out of graduation? What will this lei mean to them?
And then there’s the physicality of making the lei: conditioning the flowers, prepping the flowers, threading lei needles, wrapping, twisting, binding. My hands know these patterns so well that my mind has space to wander, but I know how important it is not just to finish something, but to finish it with love and intention.
The hana
There’s a lot of unglamorous work behind all the pretty carousels and reels of the lei I make.
It’s waking up early to pick flowers at the good spots (hello, pua kalaunu!) before they’re gone. It’s coming home and immediately sorting, cleaning, and conditioning them so they’re ready when I am. It’s the pile of stems and leaves on the floor (and my new puppy stealing them out of the bag that is destined for the compost), it's the accidental poking of my index finger so much that I now have "tattoos" on it from the sap. The repeated “just one more lei so I don't have to make it tomorrow" that turns into three or four more.
It’s also the little things that no one sees: the text messages to confirm pickup times, the small (big!) panic when a shipment runs a little late, the recalculating and reshuffling that happens when a family suddenly adds “just two more lei” two days before the ceremony. Most nights, it's just me working in the studio late into the night with only my dogs for company.
Boundaries, capacity, and care
One of the most important lessons this season taught me was about boundaries.
It’s easy to think of lei making as endless giving, we give our time, our creativity, our energy, our attention. But there comes a point where saying “yes” to every request starts to pull the quality, and the joy, out of the work. This year, I practiced saying “I’m fully booked for that date” and trusting that this, too, is a way of honoring the craft. Although, to be fully transparent, I mostly said "yes" to as many requests as I could reasonably handle.
Moments that stayed with me
Every season has a few moments that linger long after the lei are delivered.
There’s the parent who picked up a delivery of lei with so much contagious joy and excitement. There’s the parent who messaged me later with photos, their graduate still wearing the lei hours after the ceremony, petals slightly crushed but smile completely intact. These are the most important parts. The part where you share in their happiness and love.
After the last lei
When the final lei of graduation season is delivered and I return to clean up the mess I didn't have time to pay attention to while I was working, there's a little bit of sadness that the chaos has passed.
Buckets get washed and dried. Supplies find their way back into their baskets. My hands are massively tired and cramping, my shoulders are beyond sore, but my heart is happy. I am truly lucky to be able to do this.
I look back not just at how many orders I did, but at how I moved through it all. What felt good, what felt too tight, what surprised me. Some of those reflections turn into changes for next year; others simply become part of the story I carry with me as I keep learning what it means to run a business rooted in culture, craft, and care.
Holding space for what comes next
As I exhale from this season, I’m already planning the next one (I think it's definitely time for a dedicated lei fridge).
What new designs will want to come through? What systems will help me protect this work so it still feels like a blessing and not just a workload? How can I keep telling these stories so that people understand that, behind every lei, there’s more than just flowers, there’s time, relationship, and a very human heart.
For now, I’m grateful: for the hands that taught me, for the families who trust me, and for the chance to be part of so many milestones, one lei at a time.
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