The workshop was packed with mostly little girls, between the ages of 5 and 15, eager to learn how to arrange flowers - among them roses, tulips and small, white filler blooms - in the most artistically appealing way possible. The participants were given small ceramic pots filled with artificial foam and clay into which they were instructed to insert their blooms at different angles and heights. Before they arranged the flowers, the youngsters cut the floral stalks into varying lengths, slicing them at an angle to enable the maximum absorption of water, in order to make their arrangements last longer without drying out.
Ayla, the instructor from Tulip Flowers, the creative floral design company that facilitated the workshop, said: “We were delighted to hold this floral arrangement session for kids at the Sharjah Children’s Reading Festival. The idea was to get them to create some Japanese ikebana as well as general floral arrangements, using their imagination. We provided fresh flowers for the workshop and supplied the children with aprons as well to give them a feel of working like actual florists. The whole experience was designed to be creative and fun for them.”
Ikebana is a specific style of flower arrangement that originated in Japan, centred around placing them at certain angles to represent heaven, earth, and humans, Ayla said. The placement of the blooms represent the strength, delicacy and the ephemerality of living flowers.
Hind, a 14-year-old participant at the workshop and a student of Al Noor International School Sharjah, said: “It was a very beautiful and fun workshop. We learnt how to put the flowers together, about which blooms go well together and the sequence in which to arrange them in a pot or vase, how to blend different coloured flowers etc.”
SCRF is the region’s largest festival of its kind, dedicated to stimulate creativity in young minds and bring them closer to books. The event is running until May 14 in Expo Centre Sharjah with the theme 'Train your Brain’.
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