DISPLAY TACTICS

A DESIRE TO BRING NATURE INDOORS LED OLGA PRINKU TO CREATE A STYLE OF EMBROIDERY THAT MAKES DRIED FLOWERS THE CENTRE OF ATTENTION

- OLGA PRINKU

I’m so excited to be able to share my new craft with you. I call it 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. Flowers-on-tulle embroidery came from my love of making combined with my obsessive habit of bringing nature into my home. In winter, I love to make decorative wreaths with any greenery I can find. 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 the 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 down the path of thinking about tulle fabric, and embroidery hoops and flowers.

There’s something especially satisfying about taking the patterns and aesthetics you notice in nature and using them as inspiration to create shapes with natural materials in flowers-on-tulle embroidery. It helps me to slow down and appreciate the beautiful world around us.

MY CORE TOOLKIT

People are often surprised that my toolkit is not very big. It’s perfectly possible to do flowers-on-tulle embroidery with nothing but your fingertips and some embroidery scissors – that’s how I started. Over time, I’ve found that some other tools are helpful, but they’re not essential for many of my projects if your budget is tight. My core toolkit contains the following items, which are used in nearly all my projects:

• Embroidery scissors

• Micro tweezers

• Sewing needle