Christine de Beer - effortless floral craftsman
A Floral Fable: Floriograpy Design
- 29 March 2012
- click to send Christine a smile
This is the fourth and last design I did for my A Floral Fable Design demonstration at the Capilano Flower Arranging club.
The demonstration explores ways to add small floral details to tell your own floral fable or simply express yourself with floral art.
With every design I will demonstrate one concept, thought or idea and by just slightly changing a few of the floral ingredients the design flips over into its contrast.
The moral of our fourth fable is: Never be afraid to go down a new road; you don’t know what great things it might lead to!
The "new" I am exploring in this design is an updated version of Floriography, the romantic language of flowers.
In Victorian times people were much more restrained in what was socially acceptable to communicate.
So they quite ingeniously developed a secret language to send their messages by types, colours, maturity and method of delivering flowers.
Even the way flowers were received or accepted influenced the message's meaning!
The language of flowers is hugely culture dependent and has changed through the years, but some floral interpretations stretches over all cultures and has become fully ingrained in our perceptions, such as:
Red roses meaning true love. It is still the most popular flower to convey the sentiment on Valentine's Day.
Poppies worn for Remembrance Day
Extending an olive branch meaning making peace.
In my last fable I used the Victorian language of flowers to send a message. See if you can guess my message:
Dark pink roses....
Thankfulness
Mature open blooms.....
Gratitude and thankfulness
Ivy....
Friendship
My message was: Thank you for your friendship and of course for inviting me to demonstrate at the Capilano Flower Arranging Club!
For more on Floriography visit the wikipedia language of flowers page
Design note:
As a final design consideration I also demonstrated textural contrast. The one side of the armature was covered in bark: rough and earthy. The other is covered in wood veneer, sleek and tooled.
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Tutorials
Make test tubes look a bit less obvious and more natural by covering them with moss.
This is a fast and easy way to hang test tubes in a design
Favourite Flowers
Rose
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