2020 was a year chock-full of disappointment, handwringing and crazy uncertainty – then 2021 came along and said ‘Hold my gin’!
It has certainly been a wild ride during COVID, though Twine & Stem hasn’t been asleep – in fact, we’ve grown up from being a nice little side-gig to a wedding flowers business to being a fully-fledged retail bouquet business in our own right.
In May this year, we also made the risky but necessary decision to move Twine & Stem into its first commercial studio and have been luxuriating in the extra elbow-room ever since!
For years now, we’ve loved the inspiration and peaceful atmosphere of working in the hills district. With lush nature all around us on the property, we’ve been thoroughly spoiled by never being more than a few steps away from a diverse array of fresh foliage and local blooms to use in our work.
However, it hasn’t been all sunshine and lollipops running a floral business in the hills. Steep walks up and down the property, the driveway of your nightmares, swarms of mosquitoes, frigid winters, fire-safe summer evacuations and the occasional visiting spider have created their own challenges!
The benefits of having a home-away-from-home for Twine & Stem are not to be underestimated. We’ve now got all the maker space we need with room to grow, a cosy meeting area and plenty of car parking for our clients and staff.
The timing for our move was also fortuitous as we moved into our new place just prior to the crazy storms of June that hit Kalorama with its full force and left residents (including us!) without power and/or NBN for over a month in the depths of winter.
It’s taken some time to figure out the best use of our new space, but the puzzle pieces are starting to fall into place and we’ve carved out a comfortable creative working space without needing to compromise on much. We have decked out our studio with upcycled op-shop workbenches, recycled gym lockers from the tip-shop and have created drapery out of some ex-hotel bedsheets to soften the factory racking that holds our ‘florist’s stuff’.
Keeping true to our core values of Reduce, Reuse, Recycle has been an important part of fitting out the studio – with one notable exception…
The brand-new addition of our shiny new commercially sized flow-through wormery to manage our (copious amounts of) green waste. More on this to come in a later post – we are looking for help to name the new beast, though, if you have any ideas 😉
We recently also created a large, hanging dried arrangement to use some of the fallen eucalyptus branches from the storms and make an eye-catching centrepiece full of foliage and dried florals to make us feel good while we’re hard at work.
We can’t wait to see the studio floor chock-full of buckets of beautiful fresh flowers over the summer and to recruit some more flower-loving people to help us turn them into gorgeous arrangements for you!
