Painting with plants
Olga Prinku uses dried plants to make beautiful ‘embroiderery’ – perfect for pretty seasonal decorations or gifts. The Yorkshire maker explains how she does it…
I call my craft ‘flowers-on-tulle’ or ‘dried flower embroidery’ – it’s like traditional embroidery, but using flowers, foliage and other natural plant-based materials as your thread. I’m not a trained botanist or a florist – unless you count a summer job in a flower shop – but I love plants, I have a sense of wonder about the natural world, and I have always enjoyed crafting and making. If that is also true of you, then that’s all you need to try it yourself. Flowers-on-tulle embroidery came from my love of making, combined with my obsessive habit of bringing nature into my home. It could be a bare branch ripped from a tree by the wind in spring – Iwould put it in a vase, and marvel as the flowers blossomed. It could be a piece of driftwood washed up on one of the beaches near my home in North Yorkshire – perhaps I would add a sail to make a driftwood boat. In winter, I love to make decorative wreaths with any greenery I can find.
NATURE OF INVENTION
It was this wreath-making that led me to the idea of flowers-on-tulle embroidery. One day I used a garden sieve, or riddle – the tool for getting small stones out of soil – as a frame to weave my greenery around. I tucked the ends of the stalks into the wire mesh to keep the stems in place. That set me thinking about tulle fabric, embroidery hoops and flowers.
Tulle is also known as net fabric – it’s what tutu skirts and bridal veils are made from. To stitch patterns on it, tulle is stretched tightly across an embroidery hoop – which come in all shapes and sizes – until it is taut as a drum. The fabric is then embroidered.
My relationship with nature has changed since I started to develop flowers-on-tulle embroidery. I used to enjoy looking at beauty in nature but, increasingly, I feel I’m starting to appreciate it on a deeper level. I have become more observant of how the seasons change, and how every stage of a plant’s growth cycle contains its own kind of fragile beauty, from bud through bloom to seedhead. I hope you will try it, and feel the same way too.
HOW TO PRESERVE PLANTS
You can find a wide range of dried flowers for sale online. But I also learned how to dry plants myself using silica. It comes in granules that look and feel like sugar, and is much quicker than air-drying. Done well, it produces flowers that resemble lifelike replicas of their fresh versions, only smaller. With foliage, using silica instead of pressing can keep more of a three-dimensional, realistic look.
You can buy silica marketed for drying flowers. Use at least 1 kg (2 lb) of silica crystals. (Take care with silica, as some people’s skin is sensitive to it, and wear a mask if you will be working with it a lot.)
Bury the flowers in silica crystals in an airtight container – Iuse a plastic food container. I use a small spoon to gently pour a little of the silica into the flower, then a little around the outside, and build upwards until the whole head is covered without being squashed – and leave for usually no more than a day or two. Keep checking on your flowers, as over-drying can make them unusably brittle.
An alternative to silica is very fine clean sand. Although technically not a desiccant, it also allows moisture to evaporate while preserving the shape of a flower. It does take much longer, a bit like air-drying – usually weeks instead of days. Unlike using silica, don’t cover your container with a lid, as air must be able to circulate to prevent mildew.
PRESSING
To preserve leaves by pressing, simply layer your foliage between two sheets of paper towel, put it inside a heavy book and place it somewhere warm and dry. This method of drying is cheap but slow – it can take weeks for foliage to dry completely, depending on its thickness.
STEP BY STEP
Here’s an example of the kind of piece you can make in dried-flower embroidery. This involves placing your plant elements around three-quarters of the edge of the hoop, keeping a gap in the middle, with both sides tapering slightly towards the top, making a shape like a crescent moon. I love creating this shape on a 15cm round hoop, as it’s not so small as to be tricky to work on, but small enough to complete in a day. The gap in the middle makes it great for using as a wedding ring holder.
MATERIALS
• Round wooden hoop, 15cm (six inches) in diameter – these are available from craft shops or online.
• Polyester tulle, 25cm (10 inches) square in the colour of your choice – I’m using white.
• Sewing thread, to match the tulle.
• Core toolkit: embroidery scissors, micro tweezers, sewing needle, PVA glue, paintbrushes, pins, scalpel, self-healing cutting mat, ruler.
PLANTS
• Preserved red fern or pressed foraged fern (one big leaf).
• Dried yellow statice (two stems).
• Dried dwarf everlasting (one stem).
• Dried red and yellow strawflowers (four or five heads in various sizes).
• Dried red flax seedpods (three or four stems).
• Preserved red rice flower (one stem).
• Dried golden ageratum (two or three stems), optional.
STEPS
1. Prepare your hoop by stretching the tulle across it. Prepare the flowers. Trim and smooth the statice stems of any protruding membrane. Cut the dwarf everlasting flowers, leaving as much stem length as possible. Cut two fern pieces, one about 10cm long and the other slightly smaller, leaving around one centimetre of stem to weave into the net.
2. Weave the bigger fern along the right side of the hoop, starting at around three o’clock if you think of the hoop as a clock face. Following the curve of the hoop, use thread to tie the upper part of the central stem in place. Start the other fern at around eight o’clock, angling it inwards to leave some space between the fern and the edge of the hoop.
3. In this gap, build a branch with dwarf everlasting flowers: start at the base of the fern and, if possible, choose smaller flowers as you work your way upwards. Weave a couple of statice flowers on the right-hand side, below your fern. Either glue or weave some strawflowers of varying sizes between the two ferns. I like to leave a gap at around seven o’clock, so I can place the biggest strawflower there, to act as a visual focal point. Weave fan shapes from statice pieces around the smaller strawflowers, then place the final strawflower in position.
4. Add a red flax seedpod in the middle of your fans. Weave in the red rice flower to build three branches of varying size – one in the middle of your design, and one on each side close to the ferns. Don’t be afraid to reshape your branches if necessary, to make them feel more flowing and organic.
TO FINISH
Fill the remaining gaps by gluing or weaving small rice flower pieces and dwarf everlasting heads. If the gaps are really small, you could use single ageratum blooms. I have also used one stem with a cluster of ageratum flowers between the two rice flower branches on the left, to give the design more height.
TIP
If you are using glue, don’t apply it until you are happy with the placement of all the elements. Poking the stem through the net will be enough to keep the flowers in place while you work on the rest of the design.
VARIATIONS
• Swap the ferns for grasses – quaking grass or oats work well – and try foraged rowan berries instead of rice flower.
• Try yellow or red tulle for a warmer look.
• For less autumnal hues, try pink and white strawflowers instead, with yellow rice flower for your branches, and pink or purple statice.
Olga Prinku is an artist and maker who lives in North Yorkshire. Her first book, Dried Flower Embroidery: An Introduction to the Art of Flowers on Tulle is published by Quadrille (£15). prinku.com