May has been a great month for working with flowers
partly because of the bright, colourful spring flowers available, but also
because I had a new space in which to do all my preparation. During the winter we
painted the walls of our garage white, painted the floor grey and let in some
natural light. The picture above shows the lovely light quality we have
created. I ran 3 workshops in May. First of all, two back- to-back workshops to
make 3 hand-tied posies in jam jars decorated with pretty vintage paper. Here
are some of the jam jars:
Here are the flowers ready to go in my new garage space:
The first thing is to get the flowers lined up in the
right order for tying.
I was really pleased to get quite a few action pictures.
If you look carefully you will see lots of examples of wonderful spiralling of
the flower and foliage stems. This is the main challenge of hand-tying, and as
one the participants suddenly said ‘by Jove she’s got it’……and they all did.
Here is the finished product:
And here are the boxes that I made out of the large boxes that my flowers from Cornwall were delivered in. These worked very
well for carrying the posies home and it felt good to do some active
re-cycling.
Then this last weekend I ran another workshop to make a
large, exuberant arrangement in chicken wire and I got some more action photos.
We used wonderful bright yellow snap dragons and stocks in a range of
pinks/violets as the main flowers.
First everyone fixed the chicken wire in the bowls and
decorated the bowls with aspidistra leaves and raffia.
Then they made the central part of the arrangement.
Then they added in alstroemeria, astrantia, sweet william
and pinks.
Here is the final outcome. Stunning.
This weekend was the May Bank Holiday, but the weather
wasn`t very good so I spent some of it looking around the vintage shops in and
around the Abbeydale Road in Sheffield. I was delighted to find a plinth very like one I
already have. The two plinths work really well together and would look good in
a church or some other large venue.
To finish……let’s raise a glass to celebrate May flowers,
good health and the coming summer.
