Tuesday 25 June 2019

Mothers, daughters and flowers

This is my daughter, Jessie, and me a long time ago......We both love flowers and Jessie has played a big part in Meadowsweet right from the beginning. We`ve been to flower classes together, shopped in flower markets and she helped me with my workshops, especially in the early days. Now we are moving on to a new project together. We are swapping ideas about how we use flowers in an everyday way in our homes. We both think that flowers make life better - whether it is sharing a cup of tea or planning a party:
So...we`ve set up a new instagram account called just.add.flowers  Our aim is to show lovely pictures of easily available flowers (bought from the supermarket or grown at home) in our own home environments. We are trying to show how everybody can do something really satisfying with flowers with a small budget and a little thought. Before we started we decided to improve the way we take pictures of flowers and we had some brilliant help from Rachel Sinclair  She showed us how to set things up inside our homes with different backgrounds. For example:
And she showed us how to shoot into the light and blur the background:
Jessie lives in a flat in Walthamstow with a balcony where she grows flowers, tomatoes and herbs. Her flat is filled with attractive books and she uses quite small, beautiful vases to display her flowers. She's a graphic designer so she looks at flowers through the eye of an artist. Here is a sample of Jessie's recent posts on just.add.flowers:
As readers of my blog know, I have a house in Sheffield with a medium-sized garden. I look at flowers through the lens of a gardener/florist and I tend to use bigger vases than Jessie just because I have more space (the jaunty little goat is an exception!). Here is a sample of my recent posts:
We really like the way our use of flowers and our pictures inter-weave and contrast. As we develop just.add.flowers, we plan to build on this to find other ways of sharing our ideas about getting the most out of flowers every day. If you don't have an instagram account you can just click below to get to our pictures:
just.add.flowers
I will finish with another picture of Jessie and me from long ago, and a picture taken just last month. Still laughing and smiling.