30 Aug Sunday…with Workshop Photos

Yesterday I held my Summer workshop, only I hadn’t quite anticipated that the end of August was going to feel so much like the gateway to this year’s Autumn…

I like to go with the feel of the seasons, so I chose some autumnal flowers as well as having the ones which were already growing in the garden… As well as the table, I wanted to test some new surfaces people could try as I had planned this workshop to have a textural theme and use a sense of wabi sabi within our compositions.
I love the aesthetics of wabi sabi and the asymmetry and asperity contained within it as well as the impermanence and imperfection it incorporates ( I have a wabi sabi pinterest board here ) and wanted to try and include this sense in the workshop… We used lots of different herbs, spices and tea in the morning; playing with the unpredictable mess and colour they provide…I randomly handed them out and then demonstrated working with textures within composition…
cous cous… mustard powder… peanuts… pistachio nuts… …and a pear and rose hips from my mum’s garden It was brilliant seeing everyone pushing their boundaries; just letting the ‘ingredients’ do their thing without too much interference…

( these are from compositions by Sinead @sineadylemonady ) ( these are from compositions by Seona @village_alchemist ) In the afternoon we worked with more substantial plants and tried to combine the free elements from the morning… ( from Sinead’s afternoon composition ) ( below, from Sara-Jayne’s @keepupwiththejonesfamily afternoon composition ) ( below, from Sara-Jayne’s morning composition )Susan @subeepix brought along some beautiful seaweed ( and all the gourds and squashes ) and incorporated them into her images ( below )… I wanted everyone to feel like they could use my home for their palette and find colours and textures from all over the place…

( below are from compositions by Seonna @village_alchemist ) I wanted everyone to feel as free with the mess as possible; part of the luxury being that they don’t have to clear up and they just have to focus on doing and creating… ( another bit of luxuriating!! )Anna @annandthering said she loved pink ( the images below are from her compositions ), but decided to push herself into a yellow domain… although I encouraged her to punctuate with pink…as well as self-raing flour, which was an amazing contrast with her work in the morning…
There’s also a strange enjoyment which comes with sweeping everything away…it’s all gone in a moment…which brings me back to the wabi sabi impermanence… At the end of the workshop I shared some images of my Granny’s flower arrangements from the 1960’s ( there’s more to follow on that over the coming weeks )…basically it seems she was an original Instagrammer! She would have SO loved the app…although I’m not 100% sure she’d have approved of my own messy methods!Details for other workshops this year are here and the Steller Story is here