I love big, billowing bouquets of flowers - the wilder, stranger, and more haphazard the better. As a little girl I'd gather tiny buds and flowering weeds in small handfuls for my mother, gleefully showing off my creation as I returned home. Even now you can find me foraging for blooms on Saturday afternoons, filling a growing array of vases with my discoveries. In recent years I've tried to squelch this love, and hide it away. The reasons are vague, but it was a combination of feminist leanings, the ridiculous cost of flower shops, and guilt of killing a living thing. I've come to the conclusion however, that despite my internal objections, I love flowers arranging and I want to learn more about this amazing craft.
I'd love to attend a workshop in my area, something like this perhaps, but I'm going to try and take it slow. I've just begun my research, but I'm amazed by the resources online (surprise, surprise). I feel like I've already picked up a few new tips on best practices for flower arranging. Here are a few of my favorite:
+ Working in season is not only better for the environment, but you'll also get the biggest, and most beautiful blooms that way
+ There are two ways to go about starting an arrangement; one being to start with the greenery, the other to start with the biggest blooms
+ There are a lot of flower names out there, so you may want to get a flower encyclopedia and start memorizing
+ A good arrangement is as much about the vase as it is the flowers
+ Learn the basics of composition before you venture out with color
+ Rules are made to be broken so you can ignore the rest
And...in case you get a hankering to learn a little about flower arranging yourself here are a few beginner resources I've been reading through:
+ You can never go wrong with Martha Stewart, she's my baseline for most things
+ A lovely tutorial on transforming market flowers from House of Earnest
+ Five oddly insightful flower arranging tips from Lauren Conrad
+ Another wonderful go-to resource is always Real Simple
+ This post seems a little dated, but the content is so good. Their illustrations are very helpful when thinking through an arrangement
+ And just for fun, I'm in love with the Pageant of the Masters series on the House That Lars Built
I'm itching to get started. Time to find a field and start picking. - b.
all images courtesy of Rijksmuseum
I recently had what I thought was a genius idea for an art series. It involved flowers, sketching, photography and ultimately a seasonal series of blooms in our area. Like all of my ideas (I come up with "genius" ideas all the time) the beginning went so smoothly. I gathered inspiration for the images, picked a date to shoot, collected a bucket full of blooms, and my china markers- marching off into the sunset of what I was sure would be the start of something wonderful. And that's where everything went wrong, I had forgotten a very important cardinal rule...
All great ideas start with the first idea, but they rarely end there.
What do I mean by that? Well the really great ideas that turn into something marvelous or life changing rarely stay exactly as the initial thought came to you. They evolve and develop as you do research, experiment, and expand the scope of what the idea could mean. The idea is rooted in that lightbulb moment, but it can't stay there.
Unfortunately, I all too often forget to take a step back and imagine how I can improve upon something. Instead ploughing along with the first idea as if it were an infallible object worth coveting. The results are projects I'm not proud of, or that feel only partially complete. But I'm learning.
This time I'm taking the lessons I learned from this first experiment and carrying them with me into the next iteration of this idea. There are parts I loved, most of which you don't see above (I have to keep some of it a secret), and I'm excited to push forward with those aspects in hopes I'll one day create that great idea I've always been dreaming of.
Do you allow your ideas to settle and grow into something really beautiful, or do you choke them off at first bloom? - b.