Olga Prinku uses dried plants to make beautiful ‘embroiderery’ – perfect for pretty seasonal decorations or gifts. The Yorkshire maker explains how she does it...
Photos: India Hobson
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 – I would 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. CF
She will later dry her foraged finds to use in crafting flowers-on-tulle
