Hope you all had a fabulous weekend celebrating with Mom! The day before Mother’s Day, I had the pleasure of hanging out in the Seattle West Elm store for a workshop from
The Flower Recipe Book by
Studio Choo. Jill and Alethea, the lovely ladies of Studio Choo, drove up to Seattle all the way from San Francisco just for this 2 hour workshop!
There were so many amazing women taking part in this event! As someone who is on the opposite end of the green thumb spectrum (uh, I may have accidentally killed a cactus last year from over-watering… I thought it needed
more love!), I will admit that I was quite intimidated by everyone around me. These women knew their stuff and were
ooooh-ing and
ahhhh-ing over the delicious selection of fresh cut stems picked out for our workshop (I could only identify the peonies! “Pretty flower” is how I addressed everything else… oops).
Alethea and Jill started the workshop off with a demo, teaching us how to create a structurally sound base with thicker, stronger stemmed pieces before adding the focal point flowers. It was so interesting to learn about all-natural-non-processed-plant-food methods of extending the livelihood of an arrangement. We also learned how to cut and prep the stems of different types of flowers being added to our arrangements to help encourage nutrient intake. These ladies have flower cutting down to a science!
After the demo was over, we were left to explore all the beautiful flowers at our work station to build our our arrangements. Having never worked with flowers before, it was beautiful and scary and exciting all at the same time! You can see my partially finished “base” above, but I was having a bit of trouble filling up gaps and “bald spots”. Thankfully, Jill and Alethea were anxious to hear each of our
grand visions for our masterpieces and offered up great advice for how to fix any problems we were having.
After an hour of fiddling around with different flowers and colour palettes… TAAAA DAAAA! Even though my arrangement was not as purposefully asymmetric as I was planning for it to be, I’m really happy with how it turned out. Jill and Alethea were so great with answering all my (amateur) questions and helping to fix a huge bald spot that was smack dab in the middle of my arrangement.
I really wish I lived closer to my Mom. This would’ve been a perfect gift for Mother’s Day! But no complaints here, as the flowers are sitting beautifully on my kitchen table. ;)
I am really excited to dive deeper into The Flower Recipe Book! I am so fascinated by the thought of caring for multiple types of flowers all hanging out in one vase and trying to keep them looking fresh and alive for as long as possible.
