What is dried flower embroidery?

Dried flower embroidery, also known as "flowers on tulle", is a technique used to create artwork by embroidering or weaving flowers into fabric.

Tulle fabric is a type of netting which means it has holes in it. This allows the stems of the flowers (or grasses or leaves) to be woven in and out of the fabric to attach it. Tulle is transparent and comes in a huge variety of colours so you can match your tulle to your artwork background colour. Or, you can choose not to have a background and allow the wall it's hung on to become the background.

As well as using tulle fabric I also use hessian. Because this is a woven fabric it has holes in it too making it ideal for dried flower embroidery. Unlike tule, hessian is opaque so the fabric forms the background to the artwork and gives a rugged finish.

Dried flower embroidery is time consuming because there are a lot of steps and the process is very manual.

First, you harvest and dry the flowers. If you don't dry them they will shrink in situ which will mean the piece doesn't hold together as it should.

Then you prepare the flowers and stems, then weave each stem into the fabric. Some flowers don't have sturdy stems so they can't be woven but instead I sew them on or sometimes glue them on instead.

For a look at the whole process, take a look at this video: