The Language of Flowers: 8 session online summer school plus PDF: starts 29 July 2024

Come and celebrate the wonderful Victorian Language of Flowers in this 8-session workshop. We will be looking at the history of the language, which gave each plant a name, and how the Victorians used this coded language to send ‘secret’ messages.  And we will be making a beautiful textile piece featuring your own chosen flower and it’s meaning. This will be a fully guided workshop, with templates for flower drawings supplied and a session looking at using Free Motion Stitching. There will also be a comprehensive illustrated PDF of instructions. This makes it suitable for beginners. But we will also have a session looking at drawing flowers and options for this, for those who may prefer to push the boundaries and add their own drawings and interpretations. So it’s suitable for any level of experience.

Requirements are very simple: Some fabrics for your background, sewing machine and threads, a little lace and/or white net, heat n bond, or bondaweb, felt or thin wadding, paper and pens, a canvas to mount your work and some matt acrylic wax to seal it. I will run through all of these in your introductory video

Delivery will over 8 weeks,  from late July until mid Septemnber, with between 1 and 3 videos posted each week.posted into a private Facebook group. This will be all set up to go, with the first videos, and your PDF to download and print, when you join at the start of the course.  Videos will be approx 30 minutes and 90 mins

The group will stay open for a year after starting to give you plenty of time to work through the videos, so you could make a whole series of pieces – a ‘bouquet’!! There are no Live streams, but I will be available in the group to answer any questions etc

Sessions will be as follows:

Session 1: We will look at background and history, discuss references, resources and books, and then have a close look at my own collection of works (2 videos)

Session 2: We will select a flower or flowers to use, and choose a palette of fabrics to work with our choice (1 video)

Session 3: We will look at using the templates provided to create a drawing, and how to create your own drawings from either the templates or other sources (3 videos)

Session 4: We will choose a size of canvas for your work and prepare our drawings to use whilst we prepare a background. We will then be creating a bonded collaged background onto felt or wadding (2 videos)

Session 5: We will look at options for stitching our background, in preparation for your thread sketched flower, and then stitch it (2 videos)

Session 6: We will get our sewing machines set up for Free Motion Stitching and do some practise exercises to prepare us for thread sketching our flowers (2 videos)

Session 7: We will look at how to transfer an outline to our background collage, and then add all the detail to our thread sketched flowers. These will then be finished off,  if desired, with botanical style framing and lettering (3 videos)

Session 8: We will look at trimming and mounting our finished piece of work on canvas, and then sealing it for protection (1 video)

Hope to see you there – Hilary x