Two hands tie a bunch of dried flowers — ears of wheat, lavender and eucalyptus — with raffia; on the bench, scissors, florist's wire and balls of string.

Handmade objects and craftsmanship

Flowers and Decorations

This is the craft of those who build the atmosphere of a space: flowers that never wilt, lamps that stand in for flowers, installations that last an evening or a season. The materials are paper, papier-mâché, fabric, foam and light.

It is the design of a scene — a shop window, a house, a party, a shop — where every piece is built by hand and to the measure of that space, well beyond the accessory. The finished object looks simple, and that is exactly the difficulty.

A stone alley overlooking the hills; beside the door a wreath of dried flowers, and on the step two zinc buckets full of dried bunches.

Where

Where it is practised in Tuscany

It is a widespread and poorly mapped craft, because it almost always begins in small studios, often inside the home, and finds its market at fairs and online before it finds a shop. In Tuscany it concentrates where there is demand for events and hospitality: the Florentine and Sienese areas for weddings and receptions, the Livorno coast and the Versilia for seasonal installations, the area around Pistoia for its historic link with plant nurseries.

The reference tradition is that of paper flowers, which has a long history in Italy: they were made for churches, for processions, and for households that could not afford real flowers in winter.

On the wooden bench: a block of floral foam, two pairs of florist's scissors, a skein of green wire, a ball of raffia, an earthenware pot and a silk ribbon.

How

The techniques of the craft

A paper flower is built petal by petal: the shape is cut out, then warmed or modelled by hand to give it its curve, then assembled from the centre outwards. The difference between a believable flower and a fake one lies in the irregularity: if all the petals are identical, the eye notices.

Alongside paper comes Isolon, an expanded polyethylene that can be modelled with heat and holds large shapes — it is the material the metre-wide roses are made from. The lamps come from the same gesture: the inner structure carries the light, the surface filters it, and the thickness of the material decides what colour the room will be.

The rest is wiring to standard, balancing the weights, and the ability to keep upright something that looks as though it were made of air.

A workshop with a long table covered in flowers waiting to be tied, bunches hanging upside down and buckets of greenery beneath; at the back, a florist hangs a bundle up to dry.

Now

The craft today

It is a young craft as a category and an ancient one as a gesture, and it lives off two distinct markets. On one side events: weddings, shop windows, temporary installations, where what counts is the immediate effect and the hire. On the other the piece for the home, sold more and more often online and travelling across Europe.

Competition from low-cost imports exists, but it mainly touches the bottom of the market: a mass-printed flower and a hand-modelled one do not look alike from close up. The real difficulty is another one, and it is being found: these are one-person studios, with no window onto the street, that have to build from scratch their own way of being seen.

The producers of this craft

GlowBloomsCollesalvetti, Livorno