Become a Florist

I love flowers and cakes. I always dreamed about becoming a florist and running a cafe decorated with flowers. Serving the cakes I make and bringing joy to others. When I was living in Europe, I took a floral lesson to learn flower arrangement at Catherine Muller. The floral art school is located in London, UK and has its presence in Paris and New York.

I booked a ‘Vintage/Retro Style Florist lesson well in advance. The lesson ran from 9 AM to around 5 or 6 PM in the afternoon if I remember correctly. Walking into the floral school, I completely fell in love with the room decors. The room was decorated with flowers in exquisite taste. The soft lighting created comfort. There were many flowers that I couldn’t even name them. My instructor, Joe, firstly gave me a brief intro of what we would work on and demonstrated the process of arranging a vintage birdcage. She reminds me of ‘Lulu, The Flower Angel’. 🙂

Nature is the best teacher. We get inspiration from all sort of elements around us and use them to create delicate masterpieces. I used to think that flower arrangement should be an easy thing to do and I just need to choose the flowers I like and put them together. However, when I started to make my own flower arrangement, I realised how complicated this task could be. Flowers are fragile, it requires the person to be careful when handling them. Being creative and having an acute sense of beauty is key as different combinations of colours can bring out different feelings, mood and emotions.

I spent the whole morning to build the vintage floral birdcage. In addition to Roses, I also used Astrantia, Astilbe, Scabiosa and Olive branches etc. What I found challenging in the process was to make sure the stems were firmly sticking into the floral foam as there were many flowers but not enough space. When making flower arrangements, you just need to be patient and enjoy the moment. Seeing the floral birdcage being built up step by step made me feel so content and joyous.

After my lunch break, Joe showed me how to make floral gloves and ear stud. In this project, I need to place the flowers on to a white cloth. I can’t remember what I used to fix the flowers on the fabric, we probably used double-sided tape. Here is a picture of the glove from Joe. I think her glove is more elegant, and mine is more girly.

Handling the small flowers needs more attention to details as they are easy to break. My friend who lived in London came to meet me for dinner, and I made her be my hand model :P. I love my ear stud so much that I wish it could be permanent. However, many beautiful things have a short life span, so all we can do is cherish them.