The holiday season has officially arrived and to kick it off I held a few wreath workshops at the lovely little shop Sweet Charlie in Kitsilano over the last 2 days. I wanted to share some of the photos taken but first I wanted to tell you something…

I love teaching workshops. I love them for a number of reasons, like that it often gets a group of people into a room together who wouldn’t normally get together, or it brings a group of friends together doing something they normally wouldn’t do. But mostly I love them because it gives people an opportunity to make something. I take for granted that my job allows me to make things all day long. There is a certain satisfaction that comes from making things with your own two hands; whether it be baking a cake, cooking a meal from scratch, building a birdhouse, or in my case making flower arrangements and bouquets. We start out in life making things all the time. We build towers of lego, draw pictures, sculpt play dough, make telescopes out of empty toilet paper rolls…ok maybe that last one was just me. But somewhere along the way a lot of us stop making things.

I see people come in and look at all the materials laid out on the tables, in this case it was lots of evergreens, berries, wire and wreath forms. The eyes get a bit wider and almost every time someone says something like, “Oh this looks wonderful, but I don’t know if I’ll be able to do it! Is it hard?” As we go along and I start to show them what to do someone also says “Well you make it look so easy!” But they start cutting and bunching and wrapping with wire, and some have trouble and some get the hang of it quickly. Without fail though, at the end EVERYONE stands there marvelling at their creation, some in slight disbelief that they actually did it. I see them smile and feel so proud of themselves, and that is my favourite moment. No two creations look the same, even though they had the very same materials to work with, each one as unique as the person that made it.

I know that everyone isn’t going to walk away from the experience and decide to start crafting/baking/building up a storm, and that’s ok. It might be the only thing they make all year long, but I helped them do it, and that is why I love teaching workshops.

 

I had a lovely photography student Christie Wood, from Emily Carr, offer to come and capture the fun on night 2 of the workshop. Thanks for coming and snapping away Christie!


wreath 1

wreath 2

wreath 3

wreath 4

wreath 5

wreath 6

wreath 7