My new book - Crafting with Flowers 💫

I am so excited to share that my new book Crafting with Flowers is ready for pre order and I wanted you, my wonderful Substack readers, to be the first to have a peek between the pages.

I am a little in love with this new book Crafting with Flowers and that is such a lovely feeling. Many of you will know that I swore I would never write again after Flowers Forever. I won’t go into the details here but my second book was written and produced at one of the trickiest times of my life - deep in the pandemic, amongst the biggest physical move of my life and cumulating in a period of deep depression and emotional breakdown. It was hard for me to even look in the pages of that book when I first received the copy.

Crafting with Flowers however has been the total opposite experience! I have loved every minute of creating it, from conceptualisation, to the dreaming up of the projects, the writing and finally my favourite part, the photography. It’s been a dream, through and through and in so many ways beautifully cathartic. The joy of creating it shines through in the pages, I know that Crafting with Flowers will lift you up and inspire you.

When I first started discussing the potential of writing a new book with my publishers, I wasn’t exactly sure of what I wanted to write about but I knew that I wanted to step away from the topic of dried flowers. I also knew I wanted to create a book that was fun and joyful and that would encourage people to notice all the incredible beauty available to us, by paying closer attention to the natural world.

It took a few attempts and a few proposals to get the story behind the book right, to figure out the journey I wanted to take the reader on, but we finally got there and signed the deal early in 2024.

Before we go any further let me share with you a sneak peek inside the pages of this stunning new book:

The What

To find the inspiration for this book, I had to travel right back to my early days of creating. When I had first begun to play with flowers in earnest, to begin to take them seriously as a creative medium. In those early days when all I had was an instagram account and a mind exploding with creative possibilities, I spent most of my days (when not breastfeeding Arlo or rocking him to sleep) gathering flowers from the garden and my walks and arranging them and photographing them. Soon I also began to push my practice further and moved away from simply arranging flowers to making displays for the home. I was playing and flexing my creative muscles and so many of the projects that you’ll find in these pages stemmed from those very early days of play.

My favourite spread from Crafting with Flowers

And so this book is exactly about that, it is about play and joy and the beauty in every slight change in the seasons around us. The book is seasonally led, so no matter when you purchase it, you will be able to dive straight into that specific point in the year and start creating. With projects that span across the seasons, using fresh flowers, foraged botanicals, bulbs, fabrics and twine, the projects are there to inspire play and encourage experimentation. Woven into the pages are essays on my observations of the seasons as they pass, about the things I love and those that I find most challenging. Think of it like a recipe book of flowers.

And because we are all, for the most part, travelling through this one wild life at break neck speed, I decided to share the methods I use to stay connected to our natural world. Ways in which we can slow down and appreciate things more. These are perhaps my most favourite part of the book, they are the things that running this business has taught me over the last eight years. Of what working with a natural material like flowers has taught me and I wanted to share it all with you.

The Where

When I wrote Flowers Forever, I had just moved to Devon and I barely knew the landscape at all. Fast forward four years to writing Crafting with Flowers and whilst there is still so much to be explored, I do feel as if I know some of the best spots around me and you’ll see those scattered throughout the pages. There is no doubt that living here has dramatically changed the course of my creative path. I see it when I scroll back through my instagram feed, I notice it when I put together proposals for clients. And many of the projects in these pages were inspired by specific places or vistas that I walk most weeks.

It was a complete privilege to be able to show off these places in this book. From the wild cliffs of West Dorset to the depths of our local bluebell woods. And of course our garden and allotment which despite the horrendous weather last year that just did not play ball, look simply stunning in the photos.

The only thing that I feel is missing is my new studio - whilst the book was being created so too was the studio being raised. So bar one last photo of the hanging flower space, the studio doesn’t feature at all. Maybe I need to save that one for the next book!

The Who

I was incredibly lucky to work with two immensely talented photographers on Crafting with Flowers. Laura Edwards who has photographed my two other books returned for a week in the summer to photograph the majority of the images in the book. We were so incredibly lucky with the weather, the first few days she was with me were horrendous weather wise which meant we were able to capture some atmospheric shots for the autumn chapters of the book - the mist and rain was so heavy that even in mid Summer the garden looked autumnal. Later in the week, clear blue skies appeared and we captured shot after shot of beautiful summer scenes.

To help me capture a year in nature I pulled in a local photographer to me, Alice Tatham. I have long admired her work and her images of the Devon/Dorset countryside had a big influence on us moving down here. So I was delighted when she agreed to come and capture some of the images for the book. Alice was a dream to work with and her images compliment Laura’s so well.

So it was a small team of creatives, working alongside my editor and designer of the book to pull everything together. It felt so good to be given complete trust when it came to photoshoots and styling and I am so grateful that the team at Penguin felt able to hand it all over to us.

The When

Crafting with Flowers is available to preorder now from all good bookstores including Amazon, Waterstones and Bookshop.uk. I also have a limited number of books available through my website (with a sweet little gift for anyone that orders there). If you can manage it please try to order directly from an independent bookstore as it helps both them and me as the author out massively. A word on preorders, they are so important to authors as they help to tell bookstores that the book is loved by people and therefore worth stocking. It helps with algorithms which in turn helps more people to discover it - so if you are able please do consider preordering.

If you got this far, thank you! I’ll be sharing more from the book across the year and will also be back with news of workshops and give aways that will be running to support the launch.