Today I’m sharing with you my experience of a Frog Flower School Workshop, held in their studio in Manchester’s Northern Quarter.
This post is photo heavy so you might want to make a cuppa before you start reading!
If you have read my most recent newsletter you’ll see that I’ve been trying to be more creative lately. Doing something other than type at my laptop or scroll on my phone, which are typically the most active my hands get.
I think in order to stay creative, or even get your lost creative juices flowing, actually making something with your hands is key. As is learning a new creative skill. As you may already know I’m not very green-fingered. It’s something I’m slowly working on, very slowly.
So I recently took it upon myself to arrange a floral workshop for a few blogging buddies for all the reasons mentioned. Frog is ran by David Jayet-Laraffe and is a mainly an event florist, working on fashion shows, weddings, awards evenings and art installations, as well as hosting these workshops which are hopefully passing on some of the skills and confidence to the everyday flower lover.
We learnt how to spiral stems in our own hand tied bouquets, tricky at first, and my oh my, florists must have really strong hands!!
The Frog Flower School is located in the basement studio of the building and Susie was our tutor for the afternoon. She made it look incredibly easy, turns out she’s been a florist for ten years and her job has taken her all over the world. It’s fair to say she knew the answer to any questions we had.
We had a huge choice of blooms and greenery to choose from.
What we all found really interesting is that despite having the same choice of flowers, all of our bouquets looked so different! After the demonstration Susie worked her way around, giving guidance and help when needed. The workshop was 1-4pm and we also got time to make an evergreen garland using the greenery and foliage.
We built the garlands using aluminium wire which is really flexible. Then hid the wire with a sticky tape similar to masking tape, but it became more sticky as you worked with it. It is the same way that the flower crowns are made- there is a huge trend for these at the moment- perfect for summer festivals.
The garland making was really rather therapeutic, especially after the adrenalin rush of creating my first hand tied bouquet. Literally a white knuckle affair as I was so scared about all the flowers slipping out of my hand!
It was a great way to spend an afternoon and it was lovely being able to learn as part of a group, especially one of other bloggers, as blogging can be rather isolating at times. Although the chattering did completely stop at certain points in the day- as we were concentrating so hard!
It was a really inspiring day too. David and the team at Frog are so passionate about what they do and their enthusiasm is contagious- I now totally NEED to buy myself some proper florists scissors instead of grabbing the ones out of the kitchen drawer whenever I have flowers at home.
Some of David and the Frog Flower team’s work can be seen on the studio walls, lots of beautiful images as you can see below.
I feel much more confident about what to do with flowers after this workshop, so I shall test out my new floral skills and report back with how I’m getting on. I might even do a top tips post about it all.
The Frog Flower School workshop details can be found here do let me know if you go on one.
Here’s my bouquet!
susan earlam ~ horror author 
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