I'm always looking to enhance my skills and develop new floristry techniques, so when I saw this wedding workshop with Charlie from the Flower Fairies, I just had to give it a go. Charlie is a wedding florist with tonnes of experience under her belt, as well as championing a wispy yet flower-heavy style that I wanted to explore. It was so lovely to chat about various aspects of wedding floristry work with Charlie and the other workshop attendees, and I could have stayed there for days. As it was, Charlie's one-day wedding workshop, held in her dreamy studio space in Oxfordshire, packed plenty in a short space of time.
First up, her signature hand-tied wedding bouquet style, and we were lucky enough to be given a selection of the most beautiful British and imported fresh flowers to work with. I chose one of my favourite colour palettes of pink and burgundy, mixing the most stunning statement roses and dahlias with daintier rudbeckia, cosmos, scabious and phlox. Charlie is known for a style that includes a lot of dimension and movement, with flowers at varying heights and soft, airy details such as sanguisorba, thlespi and astilbe to break up the larger flowers, and so I did just that with my design.
In the afternoon we focused on creating centrepieces using sustainable methods. It's not something you're taught at college, which made it so helpful to see how another florist approached a design like this. I deliberately chose a hot red colour that I don't naturally like to design with, and found it to be a great exercise in colour theory - you don't often get to just play around with different tones like this on a day to day basis, and creatively it was a really freeing experience.
I plan to take an opportunity to expand my design skills and play like this at least a couple of times every year as my business grows, and this workshop was a very worthwhile break from the norm and a chance to do just that! I loved every minute.
Mel x
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