Yes, I make them all by hand!

Last weekend I attended my second alternative market, The Whimsy Goth Market. This market is held at the Cecil Sharp House in Camden, London and is full of creative people selling the amazing things that they have made!

I arrived at about 10.15am, which gave me roughly an hour to set up. This was less time than I had hoped for but getting caught in traffic entering London had made the journey take longer than I had allowed for.

Thankfully set up went really smoothly and everything was in place with 10 minutes to spare.

Now this is where my learning curve begins.

Although plenty of people were stopping to look, I found it very hard to engage with anyone as I just didn't know what to say!

I've always been uncomfortable with selling what I make, anything positive that I say about it always sounds like bragging to me and I'm very aware that I do not want to come across as pushy because I know that would put me off if I was the one looking around.

However, without being able to engage with people, I'm never going to be able to tell them about the flowers though. They will never know just how much I love what I do and just how important it is to me that they understand why I have chosen particular plants and leaves or why I have made the backgrounds look a certain way.

There is always a reason to the choices made, it's not just because they look pretty.

This brings me to my second problem, and the one that is going to be my biggest downfall if I can't think of a way to address it.

Nobody knows that the flowers, leaves and berries are hand made!!

Each and every petal, leaf, berry and fungus is made by hand, one at a time before being painted and dusted to enhance all the details and make them look as realistic as possible.

I pride myself on the details. It's the details that set them apart. The nibbled leaf edges, the bruising on the petals and the signs of damage or decay. Those are the things that add life to the arrangement and bring it all together. The natural world is never perfect and it is never clean and tidy, by incorporating those details I can capture the moments that others don't see. I can capture the fine line between fully bloomed beauty and the inevitable death and decay. That is what makes them look real.

How do I get that across to people though?

How do I make them understand that it is all done with intention?

What can I do to make it obvious that the flowers are not just pretty, preserved blooms, but carefully crafted floral sculptures that capture the delicate balance between life and death and expose not just the beauty around us, but the macabre side of the natural world?

I don't really know yet, but I do know that if I'm going to be able to sell my art, I need to find a way. Because until I do, they are just pretty flowers waiting for someone to notice them.