5 minute read
The loop: how a petal is formed
It's one operation, and you repeat it until your hands stop needing to think about it.
Read itThe guide
How wire and fibre become flowers.
This is about the craft, not the shop: what the hands do, why the material behaves as it does, and what ages a made flower.
Materials
5 minute read
What a chenille stem actually is
It's two wires and a spiral of fibre, made by a process borrowed from the textile industry.
Read it5 minute read
Why wire remembers, and fibre does not
This is the reason you can push a crushed petal back into shape with a fingertip.
Read it5 minute read
Fibre, light, and why texture reads at three metres
This is why a handmade flower looks warm across a room while a plastic one looks flat.
Read itForm and symmetry
6 minute read
Five-fold symmetry, and why so many flowers use it
Roses, apple blossom, buttercups and hibiscus all repeat the same arrangement, and there's a reason for it.
Read it5 minute read
The vesica: the shape almost every petal is hiding
Two overlapping circles produce the outline underneath most petals you'll ever draw.
Read it5 minute read
Scale, silhouette, and why bouquets are built inside a sphere
The outline is what a person sees from the doorway, and everything inside it is detail.
Read itTraditions
7 minute read
Paper, silk, wax and wire: made flowers across cultures
The impulse to make a flower out of something that isn't a flower is old, widespread, and almost always religious in origin.
Read it7 minute read
Flowers in Sri Lankan life
There's araliya at the temple, lotus at the shrine, and a calendar of offering that has nothing to do with decoration.
Read it6 minute read
Why people preserve flowers at all
Pressing, drying, wax, resin and glycerine are five methods with one motive behind them, and a long history of disappointment.
Read itConservation
6 minute read
Light and fading: the only real clock
Photodegradation is the single mechanism that ages a made flower, and you can avoid it entirely.
Read it5 minute read
Humidity, oxidation, and the wire you cannot see
Colombo is humid all year round. Here's what that actually does to a wire core, and what it doesn't.
Read it5 minute read
Repair as a discipline, not an admission
Crafts that make durable objects tend to develop a way of mending them. This studio arrived at one the way everybody does, by having to.
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