Seeds of Inspiration

The midterm assignment in my European Floristry class is to create a floral wall hanging. We must explain our inspiration, the flowers must be easily swapped out, and we must use skills and concepts we learned in the class so far. Recycling is one of the key concepts we learned about in this class. This is what I submitted.

The ability to set our ideas in print is a concept unique to our species. It began as cavemen depicted their conquests against the mammoth or bison on the walls of their dwellings. Fast forward thousands of years and we see Egyptians scribing their daily lives on papyrus scrolls. Medieval monks illuminated the hand-lettered manuscripts of religious ideals in exquisite detail. Gutenberg transformed the printed page by inventing the printing press with the use of movable type. The fonts of the movable type were stored in drawers like these; each cubbyhole holding a letter or punctuation mark. The printer would select the letters and string them together forming words, then sentences, then ideas. These drawers held the seeds of inspiration, waiting to be expressed onto the printed page. With the advent of electronic typesetting and the vanishing printed page, font drawers are a relic of the past, relegated to flea markets and dusty antique shops. How many seeds of inspiration have they held?

What if this drawer is repopulated with new seeds of inspiration?

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I’ve owned two font drawers for close to ten years now. In the summer I like to fill them with many different kinds of seashells and in the autumn I love to fill them with findings from my walks.

I lined each cubbyhole with yellow cardstock which were left-over response cards from my wedding invitation. I chose yellow because it showed the best contrast to the stars of the show: the seeds. Most are held in place by tension alone, others are tacked down with glue dots. Most of the seeds are newly collected this month but some I’ve had for a few years. Only one item was purchased for the purpose of this project. One cubby has a non-seed item. The seeds are secured with either Elmer’s glue or glue gun. The fresh berries are in water tubes.

This pavé design uses an analogous color scheme, ranging from green to yellow then orange and red. The color is distributed along the diagonal, providing a line of movement, with brown neutrals in opposing corners. The seeds are loosely grouped by genus while striving to achieve good contrast in texture and color between neighboring cubbies. The repeating acorns and berries provide rhythm to the piece.

I’ve always wanted to hang these drawers on the wall and have the ability to change them easily with the seasons, so I thank you for this assignment.

Click on the photo to see a partial list of the seeds used.

In the spirit of recycling, this post is also submitted for Blog Action Day. With the exception of one very large, hairy acorn, all materials used for this project were either found objects or materials I already had on hand. Won’t you join me and close to twelve thousand other bloggers in sparking a discussion about climate change?