The Tallulah Rose Flower School Bridal Weekend
As I’ve been trailing here on my blog and on Instagram, I recently traveled to Bath to take part in the Bridal Weekend- The Whole Shebang! course at Tallulah Rose Flower School. The two day course focuses on techniques for a variety of wedding products: a front-facing bouquet, a floral crown, buttonholes, an a-symmetrical urn and a floral paddle.
The workshop is located right in the heart of beautiful historic Bath, in one of the many handsome Georgian buildings. My teacher for the weekend was the lovely Saffy from Saffron’s Flowers. Throughout the weekend Saffy encouraged everyone to ask questions about anything to do with floristry, and in addition to learning about the designs we were working on, we picked up tips about sourcing materials, transporting arrangements, building up a business, keeping flowers in good condition, and finding your style.
The Tallulah Rose ethos is to encourage everyone to develop their own style, rather than giving strict rules and designs to follow. Saffy would start with the basic techniques, but never showed us a finished product to copy before we were let loose on the buckets of gorgeous flowers to get to work.
First up, we made front-facing bridal bouquets. I decided to take advantage of the opportunity to push myself to steer away from my usual colour palette of preference, and work with orange, yellow and red.
The hot-coloured dahlias from local flower farmer Pipley Flowers were combined with purple Daucus carota (carrot) sanguisorba, red crocosmia, amaranthus, purple scabious, olive and beech foliage, helianthemum heads, and (believe it or not) some actually really lovely purple carnations.
Throughout the course we were encouraged to take lots of photos, and there were lots of surfaces, backgrounds and props provided to get interesting shots.
In the afternoon it was time for some more fiddly wiring work, making buttonholes and a floral crown. Although I’ve learned wiring before and have made numerous buttonholes, it’s always good to hone skills in this kind of environment, and I picked up some tips along the way. It was a great opportunity to experiment, and see which flowers do (and don’t) last.
The floral crown was more of a challenge as this was my first go at making one, but I was pleased enough with the result. As you can see, I really loved these purple carnations and used them again for my crown.
On day two we started with an a-symmetrical urn arrangement. This was made in a very freestyle way, we were encouraged to just go for it and I really enjoyed the process. This was probably the project I enjoyed making most of all, and as you can see from my recent Instagram posts I’ve been practicing again at home.
Finally, we finished up with the largest project, a floral paddle. These can be hung on doors, nailed to walls, used to make floral arches and much more. The brief was ‘wild’.
I got a lot out of my weekend in Bath. It was totally exhausting, but in that really good way that you know you’ve spent two days constantly learning and developing. I left with more confidence and feeling inspired to go forth and make!
