When creating a flower arrangement people typically fill up designated space using colourful flowers and interesting textures and materials, but when Margaret Leeuw makes an arrangement, she concentrates on leaving a few spaces empty.
Leeuw has been arranging flowers for over a decade and today she focuses her attention on modern designs. She’s a member of the Mid-Island Floral Art Club (MIFAC) and she’ll be giving a demonstration next week on how modern designs can make eye catching creations, using less.
“In modern designs lines are very important but so is space, so you have space everywhere, there’s nothing that is sort of masked, and when there’s line and there’s space you don’t have to use lots of materials,” she explained.
Leeuw moved from Edmonton to Victoria in 1999 where she joined the Victoria Flowers Arrangers Guild, and “decided [she] loved” arranging flowers.
It’s using unusual materials and combining them in unusual ways that she likes so much, she said, and thinking outside of the box.
“You look at different material different and I like that,” she said.
Leeuw scopes out different materials from all over, and likes to use driftwood, seed pods, shells, feathers and branches and even recycled material. For The Old School House’s (TOSH) Art in Bloom exhibition, she used some pieces left over from her recent renovation and some discarded wood given to her from a friend.
Once you have all your materials there are some guidelines to follow, and Leeuw said this is the like having a recipe and instructions for a cake. You could take all those materials and simply place them together, but if you have the instructions in mind your arrangement (or cake) will turn out much different, she said. In this case the elements or “recipe instructions” to keep in mind are balance, contrast, dominance, proportion, rhythm and scale, Leeuw said. And once you have a grasp on those, you can make arrangements (or cake for that matter) without your instructions.
Creating modern arrangements also involves changing the way the plant material looks, Leeuw explained, like snipping all the ends off a leaf or binding branches together.
“So you do lots of manipulation and creating different shapes with the plant materials you collected,” she said, adding “and as soon as you spray paint something, its modern.”
Learn more about creating a modern flower arrangement with Leeuw at her demonstration called Thoroughly Modern Designs on Thursday, Sept. 13 at 2 p.m. at St. Stephen’s church in Qualicum Beach. Members of the public can attend for $5 and MIFAC members are free. Twelve designs that Leeuw creates during the demonstration will be raffled off.
For more on MIFAC visit www.mifac.jigsy.com.
