Painting

 

I have fully closed the doors on Meadowsweet Flowers as a floristry business as well as shutting down my website. Now my attention has moved on to painting, which is mostly inspired by flowers. Painting can sometimes feel a bit lonely so I recently joined the Heeley Art Club. I am tentatively dipping my toe into their Autumn Exhibition which takes place from Sunday 6 - Sunday 13 October in The Winter Gardens in Sheffield. These are the three paintings I will be exhibiting (they will be for sale):

The Heeley Art Club is made up of some really good artists and the exhibition will include a wide variety of stunning artworks. Why not drop in and have a look if you are in town next week?

Floristry sale

 

After a lot of soul searching I have decided to wind up the part of my flower business which uses live flowers for weddings, workshops and bouquets. So I have decided to sell most of my floristry paraphernalia. Here is a sample of what I will be selling. Lots of pretty Heron Cross jugs with a range of patterns:

Various enamel jugs:

Vintage containers:

Urns and containers with chicken wire:

Sundries - wire, tape, wreath bases, ribbon etc

Everything will be sold at a low price and all proceeds will be given to a charity called 'Lost Chord'. This is the charity chosen by the Lady Captain at Sickleholme Golf Club this year. It brings live music to people with dementia in care homes and day centres. Interactive musical stimuli are used to engage people, enhance their lives and improve their well being. Why not come and snap up a bargain as well as supporting a good cause.

Date and time: Saturday morning, March 18, from about 10.00 to 12.30

Place: My house at Millhouses in Sheffield - 47 Springfield Road, S7 2GE. Plenty of parking on the road nearby.

Bethan's wedding flowers

 

When our niece, Bethan, said she had a limited budget for her wedding flowers, I assured her she could do her own flowers with a small team and a bit of help. This blog shows how the ideas and skills were developed. Bethan's team would have to learn how to make a hand-tied bouquet because there were eight bridesmaids!

Then the idea we developed for the table centres was to use dark glass (mainly beer bottles and marmite jars) which would be placed on wooden slices. Here is the first mock up (using bread boards to stand in for rustic wooden slices):

Then Bethan, Jill, her mum, and her brother's girlfriend, Maebh, came to a workshop with me. We had a great day and a lot of laughs:

Everyone mastered the skill of hand-tying. Hurrah!:

And the table centres worked well too, especially when they included Bethan's lanterns (she makes these herself):

Then we had to think a bit about the kinds of flowers that would fit with Bethan's colour scheme of white, green and copper. I tried out roses, alstroemeria, gypsophila and chrysanthemums, with plenty of foliage, and also added a bit of contrasting blue (sea holly and lavender). Lovely, and very fitting for a September wedding:

Bethan bought her wedding flowers from the Liverpool flower market and they were driven to the venue the day before the wedding. Then the team got to work. The brilliant thing was lots of other wedding guests, who were at the venue the day before, helped out with the table centres, and with big jugs of sunflowers which were scattered around the venue. Everybody was really pleased to have a hand in the flower preparations. The core team were outstanding in making multiple, beautiful bouquets. Here is Bethan with hers:

And a selection of bridesmaids:

These pictures give a sense of the flowers in the venue:

Finally, here is the entire wedding party - including the men with the buttonholes which the team also made. This shows what a fantastic job everyone did. The flowers looked wonderful and added something truly lovely to a very, very happy day. Congratulations Jon and Bethan!

Looking back on 2021

 

Last year it snowed in January. As well as snow, this is the month for reflection on the past year. When I look back I realise I didn`t post a single blog in 2021. It was a challenging year for all of us, starting with another lockdown. I used the enforced isolation to follow Este MacLeod's brilliant on-line art course, Imaginarium. A lot of the course used organic inspiration, like this cactus and these mushrooms: 

Then I painted a terrarium to house the mushrooms!

As my final piece for the course I painted this imaginary vase of flowers.

So, it was a good, creative start. I also got excited about the early flowers which appeared in the garden in February.

But later in February everything creative ground to a halt when my father had a catastrophic fall. He was hospitalised for a long time and finally returned home in April in a bedbound state. He died in September. Here he is in the good times, a force of nature.

Even though Dad had a team of professional carers to look after him, much of my emotional energy was taken up with supporting him and it gave me a lot of insight to how draining it is to be a long-term carer. Although the tulips came up as usual in the spring, this is the only picture I took of them:

I have searched through my galleries, but this is the last picture of flowers that I took throughout the year. Even when I arranged the flowers for Dad's coffin, I didn`t have the heart, or the inclination, to take a photograph of them. I am so pleased that Jessie loves flowers and she kept our joint instagram account (just.add.flowers) alive all year. She is also encouraging Cormac (already 2 and three quarters!) to see things that grow and to forage about in parks and in the garden. This little collection of autumnal offerings (with Tiger!) can`t help but make me smile.

I am really hoping that 2022 will be better and that some creative energy and some inspiration will return to me.

Happy New Year to you all. May 2022 bring everything you hope for

Classy green Christmas wreath

 

Happy Christmas everyone. Tomorrow is the Saturday before Christmas and usually I would be running a wreath workshop on this day. Alas, no workshops this year. Instead, I set myself the task of making a foliage wreath only out of the plants and trees growing in our garden. I was not planning to use a bought wire base, nor any moss or straw, nor any bling or dried materials. I wanted a classy, green wreath. It was something of a learning process and I am going to set out the stages I followed so you can do it yourself if you wish. The only item, other than foliage, which is essential is reel wire (see below for details). Beginning with the raw materials:

First of all I cut some branches for making the base - willow or vine is generally recommended, but neither of these grow in our garden, The branches need to be reasonably long (about 2-3 feet) and pliable. I decided to try three different possibilities - cotoneaster, lemon verbena and fuchsia. Then I needed some evergreen foliage - I chose rosemary (gorgeous smell), choisya, ivy, box and a spruce-like shrub we have growing (a bit out of control now!). It needed far more of everything than I thought. You will see the quantities as I go through the process below. I started by stripping the foliage off the branches:

I then bent the branches into a circle, wrapping the branches around each other and roughly weaving them together. The fuchsia was useless - it didn`t have enough bend in it and just snapped. The cotoneaster was by far the best - pliable and robust at the same time. The lemon verbena smelled wonderful, but its branches were a bit brittle. I managed to incorporate some of it, just for the fragrance. I aimed to make (and managed it!) a base of about 12 inches diameter. It needed at least 12 branches - here it is:

The next stage is to make lots of bunches of mixed foliage. Each bunch needs to be about the same length and have roughly the same amount of material in it. I used 2-3 pieces of ivy, 2-3 pieces of rosemary, 2-3 pieces of spruce, one piece of choisya and one short piece of box. I made the bunches so that there were two short pieces on the left side which would be the inner part of the wreath. I wasn`t quite sure how many bunches I would need, so I made about 6 and then decided how many more I would need once I had attached these. In the end I used 12 bunches. I like to tie my bunches together with a soft florist's wire which is wrapped in a kind of raffia. Here is an example of a bunch - you can see the shorter pieces of spruce and box on the inside left:

The next stage is to attach the reel wire to the base. You can buy reel wire from Sarah Raven, Amazon or any florist wholesaler. If you live in Sheffield, I will give you some.

Next you lay your first bunch on the base and wrap the wire around the neck of the bunch and the base 2-3 times, keeping those short stems on the inside of the wreath. You need to pull the wire quite tightly to hold the bunch in place. Like this:

You can now lay the next bunch on top of the first, making sure you cover the binding point with the following bunch. Keep on adding bunches.

Just keep on adding bunches, turning the wreath as it builds. Try to keep the bunches evenly spread.

Once the wreath is complete you could just tie a piece of string or ribbon to it and hang it from a nail on your door. My method is to put a piece of ribbon around the wreath and then attach it to the top of a door. I also decided to add a bow. So....... first I got the hanging ribbon in place and then I attached a strong piece of wire to the bow and pushed it right through to the back of the base. Here is the result:

I am very pleased with this. It cost absolutely nothing! It is made out of organic material which needs to be cut back at this time of year anyway and it is about as ecologically friendly as it could possibly be. I also think it looks great - cool, green, classy, perfect. It also has a lovely fragrance as you walk into our front porch. Why not have a go yourself?