Celebrating May

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.