The paper is more than two hundred years old and fragile, and yet the colors still feel alive. What astounded me most was how she layered each tiny piece to build dimension and depth, shadow over light, petal over petal, without ever losing the botanical accuracy of the specimen in front of her. I didn’t know then how much that afternoon would shape me. I think about her work often. That’s why I study the real botanical specimen behind every paper flower I make, and I still hold that philosophy: if you cut one of my flowers in half, you should be able to see how accurately each part was built.

That visit stayed with me, and a year later it became the beginning of something I had dreamed of for a long time.

In 2019, I was working with my friend Kate Alarcon, the artist behind The Cobra Lily, on my Posey Box online paper flower course, and I shared an idea I had been carrying. Our community of paper flower makers had grown into something wide and wonderful, spread across countries and time zones, and I felt we deserved a day of our own. A day to celebrate what we make and how we make it, in every beautiful form. Cardstock, handmade paper, crepe paper. Realistic flowers, whimsical flowers, larger-than-life flowers.

Kate and I didn’t want a random date. We wanted the day to mean something, so we researched the artists who had shaped our craft’s history. Again and again, we came back to Mary Delany. We chose her birthday, May 14, and celebrated the first International Paper Flower Day on May 14, 2019.

We announced it on Instagram, unofficially and with a lot of hope, and asked our close flower friends to spread the word. We asked Kate to join us on the Paper Talk Podcast to share why International Paper Flower Day mattered to us. What happened next truly felt like magic. People worldwide started sharing their flowers and stories. Posts appeared worldwide, each one a paper bloom held up to celebrate the same day. I’ll never forget watching that happen.

Let me tell you why we chose her.

Mary Granville was born on May 14, 1700, in the small village of Coulston in Wiltshire, England. Her early life was not her own. At 17, her family arranged her marriage to Alexander Pendarves, a Member of Parliament about 60 years old. When he died a few years later, she was left a young widow with little support, and she promised herself that if she ever married again, it would be for love.

She kept that promise. At 43, she married Patrick Delany, an Irish clergyman who shared her love of gardens. They spent nearly twenty-five years together, much of it in Ireland, where she drew, painted, embroidered, and studied the plants around her. When he died in 1768, Mary was 68 and widowed for a second time.

Many people would have considered that the end of her story. For Mary, it was the beginning.

She spent long summers at Bulstrode, the Buckinghamshire home of her dear friend Margaret Bentinck, the Duchess of Portland, a passionate collector of plants and natural history. One day in 1772, Mary noticed that a scrap of red paper beside her was almost the exact color of a geranium. She picked up her scissors and began cutting petals. That October, she wrote to her niece, “I have invented a new way of imitating flowers.”

She was 72 years old.

What she created next still takes my breath away. She cut tiny pieces of paper, many of them hand-colored, and layered them onto backgrounds washed with black ink so each bloom seemed to glow. Some flowers held around two hundred individual pieces. She called them her paper mosaicks. As word spread, friends sent her specimens from their gardens, and the botanist Sir Joseph Banks sent flowers from Kew. Her work became so accurate that Banks said he could describe a plant botanically from her mosaicks without fear of error. Please visit this link to see Mary Delany’s passion flower, plus many of her beautiful pieces, online at the British Museum.

Think about that for a moment. A botanist trusted her paper flowers as much as the real thing. Her work convinced me that we can, and should, hold our own paper flowers to that standard. There is always room to play, to push our imagination and see what colors and shapes come from our hands. But the real flower, and the foundations we learn from it, should guide how our paper flowers grow.

As word of her mosaicks spread, the requests grew. Mary did something other artists would recognize. She started coloring her paper in batches and working on several pieces at once. She labeled each mosaick with its botanical and common names. She was an artist and a careful observer, and she understood that you cannot recreate a flower until you have truly studied it. In her own way, she was also building a systematic body of work, which is exactly what turns a practice into something that lasts.

Over the next decade, she made 985 paper mosaicks. Her goal was 1,000, but her eyesight began to fail before she could reach it. The collection, known as the Flora Delanica, fills ten albums, and her great-niece, Lady Llanover, left it to the British Museum in 1897. Two of her mosaicks rotate through the Enlightenment Gallery, the same room where I first saw them, and you can explore the full collection on the British Museum’s website.

Some people ask why Kate and I chose an artist whose flowers are flat for a craft so many of us practice in three dimensions. My answer is simple. International Paper Flower Day celebrates paper flowers in every form. From our research, Mary Delany is one of the few people we found who popularized paper flowers and made them well known and recognizable. We also love it because she started and mastered this artistry much later in life.

From our research, Mary Delany was one of the earliest artists we could find who treated paper flowers as serious art, and her work is still celebrated more than two centuries later. We also love that she began and mastered this artistry much later in life.

Mary shared the idea that paper flowers are more than a craft or hobby. It became an accepted art form that people could display in their homes. Her mosaicks were works of art, admired by botanists and friends alike. Look closely at her beautiful work, and you’ll see she was already building depth, one layer at a time. Mary treated paper as a serious botanical medium. She showed us that observation comes before scissors. And she proved that the most important work of your life can begin whenever you are ready.

That last part means a lot to me. I made my first paper flower at 40, and my work entered the Cleveland Museum of Art’s collection when I was 50. Somewhere along the way, I stopped believing that creativity belongs only to the young. Mary helped me believe that.

So I’ll leave you with a question. What would you make if you believed your best work was still ahead of you?

Kate has since retired from making paper flowers, but the day we created together keeps blooming every spring. Please mark your calendar for May 14 and celebrate Mary Delany’s birthday with us on International Paper Flower Day. Share a flower you’ve made, a bloom that inspired you, or the story of how you began, and use #InternationalPaperFlowerDay so we can all find each other, wherever in the world you are.

And if you ever find yourself in London, please see her flowers. Lean in close. I promise you’ll understand.

Happy Making,

Quynh

P.S. Next week, I’ll take you to Mexico City. Over Día de los Muertos, I’m teaching a floral headpiece that pairs my paper Princess Hitomi garden rose with fresh cempasúchil, the bright marigolds believed to light the way home for loved ones. The headpiece is built on mechanics Hitomi Gilliam first taught, and she generously gave us her blessing to adapt them for this workshop. I’ll share how paper and fresh flowers come together in one crown, and why honoring where a technique comes from matters to me.

I have made a lot of Princess Hitomi garden roses this past year. And this fall, I am bringing her to Mexico City. On October 31 and November 1, I am teaching a two-day paper flower workshop in Mexico City with Daniela Vazquez, and this rose is at the heart of it.

I want to share why this garden rose means so much to me.

Learning from Hitomi Gilliam

I first met Hitomi Gilliam, AIFD, in 2018 at Florabundance in Santa Barbara. Hitomi is a Japanese Canadian floral artist and educator who has spent decades elevating the floral industry through her innovative mechanics, her generous teaching, and her distinctive artistic vision.

I was only with her a short time, but I came home to Seattle full of her lessons. Soon after, I completed a floating paper flower installation for Fran’s Chocolates in about an hour. Her mechanics were so clear that I knew exactly which tools to reach for and how every piece should come together.

That is the kind of teacher she is. She champions beginners, and her passion for sharing what she knows has shaped generations of floral designers, including me.

Last November, I had the honor of collaborating with Hitomi and her son, Colin Gilliam, on a virtual workshop about fall botanicals and ikebana arrangements. This spring, while we filmed a bonus lesson together for my Princess Hitomi tutorial, she said something I keep returning to:

“You don’t cookie cutter a certain set of designs and repeat it over and over. You want to make it better.”

That is exactly how I feel about paper flowers. Every rose I make teaches me something for the next one. [Listen to Paper Talk Podcast featuring Hitomi Gilliam]

The Japanese Story of the Princess Hitomi Garden Rose

Some flowers carry more than beauty. They carry a name, a history, and a person’s legacy.

The Princess Hitomi is a Japanese garden rose bred by Rose Farm Keiji (Wabara) in Japan, introduced in 2019, and grown exclusively by Alexandra Farms in Colombia. Her name translates to “Beautiful History.” In March 2026, Alexandra Farms dedicated this rose to Hitomi, and I could not imagine a more fitting tribute.

In nature, she is a pure cotton-candy pink with a subtle lavender fragrance. What makes her unforgettable is the contrast in her petals. Her inner petals roll into four hearts, forming a quartered center, while her outer petals curl under into a layered array of starry points.

Finding a real Princess Hitomi at your local floral shop is very difficult. You have to special-order it from the wholesale market to get your hands on this beautiful garden rose. Because I couldn’t find one, I studied photographs and Google images, tested different paper weights and colors, and built rose after rose, never quite sure I had it right. When I finally showed Hitomi every version: the softer ones, the deeper ones, the ones where the quarters barely showed, she told our students:

“I totally accepted every version that she created because I’ve seen it in all those versions.”

That moment meant the world to me. No two Princess Hitomi roses open exactly alike, and that variation is part of her beauty. A bud that looks like an ordinary rose on day one keeps revealing petals until day eight. “It’s really quite magical,” Hitomi said, and she is right.

To make this beautiful garden rose in crepe paper, I will show you two distinct petal-shaping techniques to help you create these petals. The inner petals are cupped and gently curled so they swirl into those four hearts. The outer and guard petals are cupped at the base and reverse cupped at the top, then curled with an awl at a 45-degree angle until they reflex. The paper matters here, too. The airy Italian 90gsm gives the center its flutter, and the German doublette gives the outer petals the strength to hold their points. [To understand European crepe paper better, click here.]

What You’ll Make in Mexico City

On October 31, 2026, Dani and I will explain and demonstrate a modified version of Hitomi’s foundation technique in Mexico City, with her written permission, paired with my own paper flower construction. Here is how our two days will unfold:

Day 1, Saturday, October 31. We will make the Princess Hitomi garden rose by combining two different European crepe papers, Italian 90gsm and German doublette, row by row from the center outward. I will show you how to cup, reverse cup, and curl each petal, and how a 103-petal rose becomes surprisingly approachable when you build it one set at a time. Lunch is included, with a view of the Día de los Muertos festival.

Day 2, Sunday, November 1. Dani and I will show you step by step how to build the structure for a wearable floral crown, then bring your paper roses together with fresh marigolds to finish it. You will leave wearing something that holds both the paper flower and the living one, on a weekend devoted to celebrating the people we love.

We will gather at the studio at Tabasco 232, Roma Norte, CDMX.

Taught in English and Spanish, Yours to Keep

Daniela Vazquez will teach in English and Spanish, and I will teach in English, with Daniela interpreting so that every student can follow every step.

One unique thing I am offering for this workshop is access to the full Princess Hitomi tutorial video with English and Spanish subtitles on my learning platform, plus the complete instruction book in English and Spanish, including the cutting guide, templates, and row-by-row build chart. You can make your next rose at your own table, at your own pace.

Las instrucciones y el video están en español, para que sigas creando mucho después del taller.

Frequently Asked Questions

Do I need paper flower experience? This workshop is for beginners and advanced students alike, as we’ll teach multiple ways to make this garden rose from bud to full bloom. “If this is your first bloom, welcome. If it is your hundredth, I am glad you are still here.”

Are supplies included? Yes, your $450 fee (or 7700 pesos) covers all supplies, including paper, materials, and fresh flowers.

What language is the workshop taught in? Both. Daniela Vazquez teaches in English and Spanish, and I teach in English with Daniela interpreting. Your video has both English and Spanish subtitles, and your instruction book is in English and Spanish.

How much is the workshop? $450 USD, approximately 7,700 pesos. It includes lunch on Day 1, the tutorial video, and the instruction book.

Where is the studio? Tabasco 232, Roma Norte, Mexico City.

Join me in Mexico City and Make This Garden Rose with Me

Hitomi taught me one clear lesson that can change how you work for years. This Día de los Muertos weekend, I would love to pass that along to you.

Ten seats remain for October 31 and November 1 at our Roma Norte studio. You will go home with your Princess Hitomi roses, a crown you made with your own hands, and an English-and-Spanish video and instruction book to keep creating long after.

I would love to make this rose beside you. Message me if you have any questions.

Happy making, and I hope to see you in Mexico City,

Quynh

P.S. Ten seats, two days, and one very special rose. I hope one of them is yours.

The first cool mornings have arrived here in Seattle, and every year that crispness in the air reminds me of the same thing. The holidays are coming, and they always arrive a little sooner than we feel ready for.

If you make and sell your work, you may already know this season can be your busiest. For many creators, November and December bring in more sales than any other stretch of the calendar. People are searching for gifts that feel meaningful, handmade, and personal. They are searching for exactly what you make.

I learned this years ago through my paper flower kits. Each kit held everything you needed to make one bloom, from peonies to dahlias, with all the crepe paper and wire cut and ready, and a step-by-step guide filled with detailed photos. For anyone who wanted a little more help, I offered a video version to follow along with. The kits didn’t include scissors or glue, but my supply list shared exactly which ones I recommend and where to find them.

I used to sell paper flower kits. Peonies, dahlias, and a few other flowers, each one packed with all the crepe paper and wire you’d need, plus step-by-step instructions along with detailed photos to make it easier to explain when my words didn’t explain it well enough. If someone wanted a little more help, they could buy the video version too, and I included a link to it in the printed booklet. (Scissors and glue weren’t included, but my supply list told you exactly which ones to buy and where.)

Some people made them at home. Others gathered their friends and made them together. And I didn’t keep the kits just for customers. I brought them to small-group lessons in people’s homes and to my own workshops.

The best part? I made them during my slow months. By the time the holidays came, they were already sitting on the shelf, ready to go.

That is why now, in early October, is the best time to begin.

So let me ask you: are you ready?

I’m not asking if your shop is perfect. Mine never was.

I’m asking something simpler. If a friend stopped you at the coffee shop tomorrow and asked, “What are you selling for the holidays?” could you answer her in one sentence? Could you tell her who it’s for?

If you can’t yet, that’s okay. That’s exactly where we start.

Start with your why

October 2011. I was home recovering from back surgery, and I was figuring out what to do with the next phase of my life

I had started doing corporate event planning, and my friends knew I could organize well. She asked me to help plan her wedding. Eventually, she asked me to make the decor and said she wanted paper flowers. I had never made paper flowers before, but it unlocked a creativity I never knew I had. I fell head over heels in love with this craft, and I started with cardstock, but after much research, I found crepe paper, and that was when I became addicted to this medium. I didn’t really know what I was doing. I just started cutting petals.

The first one I made was a peony. I was proud of it then, but looking back, it was imperfectly perfect. I don’t have it anymore, but I think about it all the time. It pushes me to make better paper flowers when I think I am done with the piece.

There was no business plan. Just crepe paper, a pair of scissors, and a reason to get up in the morning.

That quiet need became my why. All these years later, it still shapes every decision I make, from the workshops I teach to the pieces I say yes to.

I’ve noticed something in the creators I mentor. When someone feels stuck on what to sell, it is rarely because they lack talent or ideas. More often, they have too many ideas and no anchor to choose between them. Your why is that anchor. Last year, a member of our Mastermind brought me her list of items she planned to sell on her website. Every idea was good. She just couldn’t pick one.

So I asked her why she started making flowers in the first place.

She said, “It’s what I have been making this past year. Requests from her clients.”

We looked at the list again, and several of those ideas fell away right there. What was left was flowers that I thought were more holiday-appropriate and could easily be highlighted and used for the upcoming holiday.

That’s what your why does. It helps you choose.

When you know why you make what you make, your offer stops being a guess. You know who you are making it for. You can tell which ideas truly feel like you, and which ones you are chasing because someone else is doing them. Even your price becomes easier to say out loud, because you understand the value behind it.

So before you plan a single holiday post, sit with these three questions for a few quiet minutes:

Why did you start?

Why do you keep going, even on the hard days?

What are you really hoping to build?

From your why to one clear offer

This month, I created a worksheet for members of our Paper Talk Mastermind, and I want to share its heart with you too. It asks you to choose one offer for the holiday season. Just one. A kit, a small workshop, an ornament, a bouquet, a custom commission, or even a gift card.

One offer can sound small. It wasn’t, for me.

My kits were one thing: a small, clear package so customers could easily see what was inside and what else they would need, with crepe paper, wire, step-by-step instructions, and an easy-to-follow photo guide to make one flower. Yes, I made a peony version and a dahlia version, with a few difficulty levels. But I could describe the whole thing in one sentence, and I think that’s why people found it so easy to say yes.

Here are the questions I asked our members to answer. Pour a cup of tea, grab a notebook, and try them yourself.

What is your why? Write it in a sentence or two, in your own words. It doesn’t have to be poetic. It just has to be true.

What is your offer? Name the one thing you will sell or teach this season.

What will you charge? Write down a real number. If it makes you a little nervous, that is often a sign you are getting closer to the right price.

Who is it for? Describe one person who would love it. Not “everyone who likes flowers,” but one person. Maybe she is searching for a gift for her mother, who has everything except something handmade.

How does it connect to your why? This question turns a product into a story your customer can feel.

Where will you sell it, and by when? Your website, Etsy, a holiday market, a shop partner, or simply your DMs. Then choose the date your offer will be ready.

How will you measure success? Choose one thing to track this month, such as how often you share your offer, how many messages you receive, how many orders come in, or how many students sign up. For example: “I’ll share my offer eight times in October.” Watching one number keeps your focus clear and spares you the noise of tracking everything at once.

What might get in your way? Is it your limited time, confidence in showing up, not being able to justify your pricing to yourself, or ability to photograph your products? Name it yours now and write it down. Post it so you can see it and think about how to solve it.

Letting people see it

An offer only works when people know it exists. And I know that feeling of hovering over the share button on a post that asks someone to buy something. People will not know what you are offering unless you share it. Don’t let it stop you from selling your products. Sometimes you have to hit share, walk away, and see what happens.

So I kept the plan small on purpose. Two posts and three stories a week. Each week of October has one focus, so you never have to stare at a blank screen wondering what to say.

In the first week, share your story: why you make what you make, with a photo of your hands at work. In the second week, show the making through a short process video or a step-by-step carousel. In the third week, share the reveal, introducing your offer, who it is for, and the price. In the last week, extend the invitation with a clear, kind call to buy, book, or message you.

If I could give you only one tip, it would be this: say the price.

Say your price with confidence. You might hear a lot of no at the beginning, but your real followers will come and say yes to your art and to you. Find your style and keep creating to define it further. Use every moment that you are not busy to make your flowers. Learn to create them and tell your audience the stories behind them. Slowly but surely, you will find the followers that will believe in your work and you. It feels awkward the first few times. Then it doesn’t. And the people who were quietly interested finally know how to say yes.

If you have been waiting for a sign to get ready for the holidays, let this be it. You don’t need to do everything. You only need to know your why, choose one offer, and share it with care.

For paid subscribers, I’ve gathered the full October Offer Worksheet into a printable PDF, and I’d love to talk with you one-on-one about your offer.

Happy Making,

Quynh

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This morning, Episode 200 of Paper Talk Season 9 with Jessie, Sara, and Quynh went out into the world.

I made my coffee, sat down at my worktable, and looked at everything spread across it. Nandina berries waiting to be put together into a branch. A half-completed chrysanthemum drying, waiting for its other petals to be glued on. A page of questions for next week’s Paper Talk Podcast guest. Workshop notes with arrows and circles in the margins. A bag of sheet moss and chunky soil waiting to become something new.

I have always been a big picture planner, where I can see the whole map before I take the next step. Knowing where each path leads and how it connects to the next one gives me confidence and lets me execute without worry. But lately, when I look at my map, I see something I did not plan for. I see a road that keeps splitting into more directions than I can walk at once.

And every one of those directions is beautiful and full of possibilities.

That is the part that makes this hard to write. I am not standing at a crossroads between something I love and something I don’t. I am standing where all the paths feel like home, and I am slowly learning that I cannot live in all of them at the same time and give each one the devotion it deserves.

So today, on the day we reached two hundred episodes on Paper Talk, I want to share what this season of my life has taught me, what I learned, and where I faltered. And the many questions I am still holding in my hands.

The paths I am walking

When I look at the roles I hold right now, I can trace each one back to a single yes.

The artist. This is where it all began. In the studio, I am creating paper flowers that bring in steady income and give my creativity room to keep growing. Some days that means commissions with deadlines and crepe paper swatches pinned to the wall. Other days it means holing up in my studio to experiment with paints and understand petal shapes, to see what it wants to become. The artist in me is the one who gets quiet, who notices how light falls on a sheet of crepe paper, and who still gets a thrill when a flower finally holds its shape and becomes a beautiful bloom I can proudly show off.

The podcaster. I never imagined I would become someone who speaks into a microphone every week. But Paper Talk has become one of the most meaningful parts of my life. It is where I get to connect with you, build relationships with listeners I may never meet in person, and sit across from artists whose work I admire to ask them how they did it. Two hundred conversations. Two hundred small windows into someone else’s creative life.

The teacher. In my in-person workshops and in the Paper Talk Mastermind, I get to watch people step out of their comfort zone. There is a moment I love, and anyone who teaches will know it. It is the moment the student looks down at what they just made and realizes they could do it. Their shoulders drop. Their face opens. I would teach a hundred workshops for that moment alone. I can’t wait for my next workshop in Mexico City, where I get to teach you how to make a paper garden rose and show you how to incorporate it into a floral crown to celebrate the Day of the Dead, or Día de los Muertos.

The new path, a love renewing. If you know me, I am always open to new possibilities, new connections, new ideas, and this summer, I fell in love with gardening all over again, only this time the love grew more profound and felt more beautiful than before. I committed to it fully, and I watched my garden roses, especially my Koko Loko, unfurl and my container plants flourish under my care. Having cut flowers or live plants intermingling with my paper ones makes a room feel alive. It makes your home more loved. This fall, I am teaching a kokedama workshop with Samantha Leung of Hemleva and Trinh Nguyen of Ramie, where we will show attendees how to wrap a plant’s roots in soil and moss so it can grow as its own small, living sculpture. It feels like a different medium, and at the same time, the most natural next step.

The community builder. Earlier this month, Snohomish in Bloom filled the streets on September 12. I served on the board that helped bring it to life, and it was a huge success. Seeing a whole town gather around flowers, watching families wander from booth to booth, knowing I had a hand in building that day, is something I will hold with me for a long time.

Over the months, I keep journaling and returning to this ever-growing list, and I keep asking myself the same question. Which one makes me the happiest?

And every time, the answer is: all of them.

Each role fulfills something different inside me. Each one lets me be me.

What two hundred episodes taught me

I want to spend some time with the podcast here, because it has been one of my greatest teachers.

Back in 2018, when the first episode of Paper Talk dropped with Jessie and Priscilla, I thought hosting a podcast was about talking. My job was to fill the space, sustain the conversation moving, and make sure there was never an awkward pause. It took me a long time to realize it was quite the opposite.

Hosting a podcast helped me learn to listen. In the early days of starting Paper Talk, I often listened while already grasping for my next question, and I missed the moments when a guest was about to say something that mattered and should have been explored more deeply. Over time, I learned a different kind of listening, one where I stay with what someone is saying and notice what they almost said. Some of my favorite moments on the show happened right after a pause, when a guest took a breath and shared what they had not planned to share. I think of my conversation with Margie Keates earlier this year. A few minutes in, she stopped in the middle of a thought and said,

“I think this is one of the first times I’ve really talked it out, but I want to be as vulnerable as possible.”

What she shared next, about a year of quietly losing her creative fire, became one of the most memorable conversations we have ever recorded.

It helped me to ask questions that open doors. I learned that the right question does not demand an answer. It makes space for one. Over time, I learned to ask our guests what they have been building, growing, and quietly accomplishing. With patience and by creating the right space, they would often tell me something they had never said out loud before.

It helped me to speak and share better. Two hundred episodes of hearing my own voice played back have a way of refining you. I have learned to say what I mean more clearly, to tell a story with a beginning and an end, and to trust that my own experience is worth sharing too.

And it helped me to step back. This was the hardest lesson and the most important one. The best episodes are not the ones where I shine. They are the ones where I get out of the way and let someone else’s story fill the room.

One conversation in particular stayed with me well after we stopped recording. When Margie Keates joined us to talk about burnout and the beauty of beginning again, something in me altered. She spoke about wanting to return to the flowers she once loved making, to create a peony again, simply for the joy of it. I remember nodding my head during the recording. But it was weeks later, and then months later, that her words kept finding me. At my worktable. In the car. Late at night when my list felt longer than my day.

Beginning again. I didn’t yet know how much I would need those words.

Where I faltered

I want to share the places I have fallen short, because we do each other a disservice when we share only the polished parts.

The small stumble. As much as the podcast has guided me to listen, I know I still have room to grow in how I ask and frame the question. There are episodes where I walked away thinking I knew what our listeners wanted to hear, and I didn’t quite get there. I did not frame the question clearly enough. I let a thread go when I should have followed it. I was so focused on making space for my guest that I forgot to gently guide the conversation toward the thing you came to learn.

It is a small failure, but it is a real one. And I am working on it. I want to become the kind of host who holds space and still knows exactly where the conversation needs to go.

The bigger one. This is the harder one to say.

Some days, I feel like an imposter in the very roles I built for myself.

I will be in the studio, and a voice in my head will whisper that a real artist would be spending more time here. I will be recording an episode, and I will wonder whether I have prepared enough to deserve the guest’s time. I will be teaching, and I will think about the pieces I have not finished and the emails I have not answered.

For a long time, I thought this meant the roles were not true to me. That maybe I was pretending, taking on titles that did not quite fit.

But I have started to wonder if that is the real story.

Because when I am inside any one of these roles, fully present, it feels wonderful. It feels right. It feels like me. The feeling of being an imposter does not come when I am doing the work. It comes when I am pulled away from it, when I am split across so many directions that none of them gets the whole of me.

The problem isn’t that I don’t belong in these roles. The problem may be that I am overextended, too thin to live wholly in any of them.

And that is a different kind of failure. It is not a failure of ability or belonging. It is a failure of capacity. Of saying yes to every beautiful road without asking how many roads one person can walk at once.

I do not say this to be hard on myself. I say it because I think many of you know this feeling too. When everything you love is asking for your time, it is easy to believe the thinness you feel is proof that you are not good enough. I am learning that sometimes it is simply proof that you are carrying too much.

The question I am holding right now

Recently, I was invited to join the board of another nonprofit organization. I believe in their mission. I believe in the people building it. After Snohomish in Bloom, I know what it feels like when a board comes together and creates something that matters to a whole community.

And I want to say yes.

But for the first time, I am pausing before I do. I am asking a question I have not always asked myself.

Do I have the capacity for this too?

I have been thinking about this question through the lens of kokedama. When you make one, you wrap a plant’s roots in a ball of soil, then bind it in moss so the whole thing can stand on its own. The ball needs to be the right size for the plant it holds. If it is too small, even a healthy, thriving plant will tip over. Not because anything is wrong with the plant, but because it has outgrown what is holding it.

I think about that often now. Maybe capacity is not about how much I love something. It may be about whether what is holding me is big enough for everything I am trying to grow.

I do not have the answer yet. And that is okay. Some questions deserve time and a chance to sit in the back of your mind to work themselves out.

What I am still learning

When I step back from the map and look at all these roads together, I notice something I did not see before.

In every role, I do the same thing: I learn, then I teach what I learned.

In the studio, I learn what paper can do and then share it with you. On the podcast, I learn from every guest and then pass their wisdom along to our listeners. In workshops, I teach what I know and learn something new from every student.

I love the philosophy of learning and teaching in so many ways. It lets me explore all my hobbies and my love of beauty. And maybe that is the thread I have been looking for all along.

When I make a paper flower, each and every petal is shaped on its own. Some are wide and open. Some are small and tightly curled. Each one has its own character. But they all gather around the heart of the flower, the receptacle, where the pistil waits for pollen and the seeds of what comes next begin to form. Without that center, nothing holds. You are left with beautiful petals scattered across the table.

I have spent so much time looking at my petals, the artist, the podcaster, the teacher, the gardener, the board member, and wondering which one I should choose. But maybe the answer is not to choose a petal. It could be to tend the center that holds them all.

Learning and teaching is my center.

It is what holds everything together, and if I care for it, if I keep it steady and strong, then I can let each petal have its season. Not every role needs to be in full bloom at the same time. Some can rest. Some can grow slowly. Some can wait until spring.

That is what I am still learning. How to let a role rest without feeling like I have abandoned it. How to say not yet instead of no. How to trust that beginning again, as Margie reminded me, is not a step backward. It is simply a different way of moving forward, with more experience and a clearer heart and mind.

Where the road goes from here

Two hundred episodes. I think about the version of me who recorded the first one, nervous and unsure, and I want to tell her that she was right to keep going. I want to tell her that the road will split more times than she can count, and that each new path will be worth exploring.

I also want to tell her that it is okay to walk slowly. It is okay not to take every road at once. It is okay to stand at the fork for a while and listen.

If you are standing at your own crossroads right now, with every path feeling meaningful, and you are not sure how much more you can hold, I would love to hear from you. Comment and tell me which roads are calling you, and which ones you are learning to let rest. I read every message.

And if you would like to hear where this thought began, Episode 200 of Paper Talk is out today. Thank you for listening, for reading, and for walking beside me on every one of these roads.

I will let you know what I decide about that board seat. For now, I am still sitting at the fork, tea in hand, listening.

I make botanically realistic flowers out of crepe paper for a living, so it might surprise you that my other talent, the one that never makes it into a tutorial, is getting busy, talented people to agree to build something whimsical and slightly absurd for a flower festival. Snohomish in Bloom, our town’s first flower festival, started as a single shared spreadsheet in early summer and grew, by the last week of August, to more than twenty-five rows: storefronts, benches, railings, and light posts along First Street in downtown Snohomish, each one paired with a florist and/or a flower farm, each one carrying a one-line theme that somebody had to turn into something real by eleven o’clock on Saturday morning of September 12.

If you view our spreadsheets by themselves, it sounds almost like a fever dream. A wedding dress made of blooms outside For The Luv Of Bridal. A moss-covered cocker spaniel with a floral collar standing in a flower meadow at Sno Pets Acupuncture and Wellness, built by Alicia Schwede of Fleurs Creative and her team. A lipstick tube with a branch growing straight through it at Sprig Beauty. A hot air balloon on the Carnegie Building’s lawn patio. A giant coffee cup with steam rising all the way to the rafters at Proper Joe Coffee, also Alicia’s doing, because apparently one whimsical build a day wasn’t enough for her. A garden gnome tucked into a flower planter. A wine glass at the Snohomish General Store. As part of the board of Snohomish in Bloom, I had a front-row seat to watching each of those one-line ideas move from a cell in a spreadsheet to an actual thing standing on First Street.

The matching was its own kind of work. Mandy Hereth of Snohomish Valley Floral, who is also on the board, took on two locations: a vase arrangement at Annie’s on First and a railing near the drinking fountain that became a run of watering cans pouring out cascading color. Alyssa Hoffman of Sprig did her own storefront and then said yes to a second spot down the block. Tracy Sundby of Freedom Flowers signed up to build her installation live, during the event itself, which is either brave or slightly unhinged depending on how you look at it. And where we didn’t have a florist to spare, we had volunteers, decorating a railing here, hanging flowers from the trees at Worthy there, filling in wherever a business wanted to participate but didn’t have a design partner lined up yet.

None of that labor or all the hard work of processing the flowers, building out the mechanics of each structure, was visible in a finished photograph or video. What people saw on September 12 was First Street transformed, and the Community Dahlia Show tucked onto the Carnegie Building lawn with its judged and public-voted blooms, plus three free education classes on pansies with Brenna Estrada of Three Brother Farms, dahlias with Erin Clark of Muddy Hill Flower Farm, and honeybees with Kimberly Alford of Fobes Hill Honey, and two paid workshops featuring flower crown workshops with Fresh Flower Crowns: Sandy Figel of Verbena Flowers teaching how to make them with fresh flowers and then with Tracy Sundby of Freedom Flowers with dried flowers!

My job that day was to document and share it on social media, from 6 am to show what needed to be done before the event opened to the public to the very end when people had to wrap up and close the day. Because of months of planning and organizing, that day was more or less on schedule, more or less as planned, which for a first-year event run mostly by volunteers felt like its own kind of miracle.

Throughout the entire day of our event. People kept asking us if this flower festival has always been around. Are you going to have it again next year? Can you do this once a quarter? If only they knew how much work it was to put this one single day together. Our recap post pulled over a thousand likes in its first day, more engagement than anything we’d posted before it. People used the word magical more than once. Someone wrote that it was the best downtown event in forever. More than one unprompted comment said some version of “please do this again, and we hope it’s twice as big next year.” A few people specifically remembered the watering cans on the railing overlooking the Riverwalk. Others couldn’t stop mentioning the dahlia show where we had 74 dahlias submitted!

One important thing I want to share is how many volunteers show up not only on the day of the event, but days before and days after. Volunteers drove down from Canada to help process flowers donated by local flower farms. They not only helped process and bundle all the flowers for the floral design team, but they also pitched in when the floors needed sweeping or buckets needed cleaning. People showed up on Monday at 6 am to help take down the installations and clean up. It was an incredible way to show community.

We’re already talking, as a board, about what a second year looks like. I’ll be back with more of that as it takes shape. For now, if you’re ever driving through downtown Snohomish, Washington, and you see a coffee cup made of blooms with steam rising off it, or a wine glass, or, if we’re lucky, two flower umbrellas next year instead of one, that was us behind the scenes planning how to represent our flower farms, flower designers, and storefronts in downtown Snohomish.

Thank you to the incredible local flower farms who donated thousands of blooms to make Snohomish in Bloom possible. We could not have done this without your generosity: Lauren Bulger of Flower and Flour, Megan Kirkendorfer of m’Eggs Flower Co., Christine Tareen of Misfit Dahlias, Kazua Bedker of Hmong Highland Garden, Aimee Heriard-Dubreuil, Erin Clark of Muddy Hill Flower Farm, Gigi Leupold of GigisDahls, Rebekah Desloge of Herbie Green Farm, Becca Watson of Summit Dahlias, Meaghan Parks of Lou Girls Flower Co, Rachel Christensen of Rooted Wisdom Gardening Services, Caity Kruger of Little Jack Flowers, DaleLynn McAlister of Dubuque Dahlias, Megan Lauritzen of Lauritzen Flower Farm, Chrissie Zavaglia, Beth Kendall of Flower Farmer Girls, Molly Snowdon of Foraged Floral, Pamela Ronson of Seedfolx Farm, LLC, and Janet Fraser. Your kindness, your flowers, and your belief in this community are what made First Street bloom, and we are so grateful to each of you.

Thank you to all of the floral designers and their teams whose creativity and hard work made downtown Snohomish so beautiful. We are so grateful to Oleysa Pastushok of Calla & Lily (@calla_and_lily), The Petal and The Stem (@thepetalandthestem), Betsy Morris of Club Meadow (@clubmeadow), Tracy Sundby of Freedom Flowers (@freedomfarmflowers), Molly Snowdon of Foraged Floral (@ffloral2025), Alicia Schwede of Fleurs Creative (@fleurscreative), Jessica Haughian of Jessica Blooms (@jessicabloomsfarm), Geneva and the team at My Eclectic Home (@my_eclectic_home), Caitlin Angeloff of Flowerful Seattle (@flowerfulseattle), Beth Kendall of Flower Farmer Girls (@flowerfarmergirls), Mandy Hereth of Snohomish Valley Floral (@snohomish_valley_floral), Amanda of Little Barn Candle Co. (@littlebarncandleco), Alyssa Hoffman of Sprig Beauty (@sprigbeautyco), Andrea Goffin (@andreajeanc), Mariana Doiron of Mars Flora (@marsflora_) and Lynne Davey of Davey Farm (@davey_farm), Betty Walton of Daisy and Wish (@bettyforflowers_), Malissa Lauritzen of Fearless Florals (@fearless.florals), Alixandra Bomar of Blanc Noir Farm (@blancnoirfarm), Valerie Werkhoven-Warren of Sky Vale Farm (@skyvalefarm), Angelina Langley of Sparrow Glen Flowers (@sparrowglenflowers), and Snohomish County Flower Collective (@snocofloco). Every installation you created along First Street brought so much joy and beauty to our town, and we cannot thank you enough.

We also want to thank all the volunteers who came out and helped bring Snohomish in Bloom to life. Your time and your hard work meant more to us than we can fully say: Jolene Haas, Mustapha Idrissi, Mary Murray, Gina Christian, Nicole Neatherlin, Judith Adcock, Angela L, Joanne Ringen, Kelli Knizek, Jessica Martinez, Gram Bonilla, Deep Mangat, Elaine Wong, Timothy Matson, Lindsey Butcher, Noelle Matthews, Reiko McNamee, Tosha Nicholson, Colleen Pattison, Amy Hall, and Lisa Pedigo. This event would not have happened without you, and we are so grateful for every hour you gave.

Another key part of this flower festival’s success was our botanical market. This was our first time putting together a full market for Snohomish in Bloom, and it turned out to be a huge success, so much so that every single vendor told us they want to come back next year. From food trucks to florists to makers of every kind, First Street was filled with color and life all day long. Thank you to Pompeii Woodfired Pizza Truck (@PompeiiPizzaCom) and Sweet Wheels (@SweetWheels_Seattle) for keeping everyone fed, and to all of our incredible market vendors who signed up and trusted us to bring people to their booth: Blossom Dearie Treasure (@Blossom_dearie_vintage), C and R Farm (@candrfarm), Dixie Cup Flowers (@dixiecupflowers), Flower and Flour (@Flowerandflour2025), Flower Farmer Girls (@FlowerFarmerGirls), For the Love of Dough (@for.the.love.of.dough), Freedom Flowers (@FreedomFarmFlowers), Golden Root Roses (@golden_root_roses), Growing Kindness (@GrowingKindnessProject), Heart N Soul Farm (@HeartNSoulFarm), Hemleva (@Hemleva), JC’s Wood Shop (@JCS_wood_shop), Jon Kaplan Photography (@JonKaplanPhotography), Lou Girls Flower Co (@meaghan_lougirlsflowerco), m’Eggs Flower Co. (@meggsflowerco), Muddy Hill Flower Farm (@muddyHillflowerfarm), Petaling Dreams (@Petaling_dreams), Quincy & Coco (@ShopQuincyCoco), Rooted Wisdom Gardening Services (@RootedWisdomGardening), Seedfolx Farm and Herbie Green Farm (@SeedFolxFarm and @HerbieGreenFarm), and suchaehwa designs (@Suchaehwa_designs). Thank you for taking a chance on our very first market. We cannot wait to welcome you back next year.

Thank you to the sponsors who believed in us and helped make Snohomish in Bloom possible. Our presenting sponsors, Swans Trail Farms and Tanya Mock Real Estate, backed this event from the very beginning, and we are especially grateful for that early trust. Kathie Salvadalena and One Common, represented by Laura Dana, stepped in as our signature sponsors, and Dani Miska supported us as a supporting sponsor. We also want to thank our friends of the bloom, Amanda Smith, Chelsea Barone, Columbia Bank, Kortney Henry, and Melissa Spada, for their generosity.

Snohomish in Bloom was organized and brought to life by our founding board: Alicia Schwede, Beth Kendall, Mandy Hereth, Rebecca Grant, and Quynh Nguyen. If you would like to participate in flower donations, floral design, or even sponsoring this event, we would love to have you. Visit our website at www.snohomishinbloom.com to learn more.

Last weekend I watched Cher and Sandy walk into a room of strangers, nervous and unsure, and stumble through their introduction. The next morning I watched them do it again, at a different table, in front of different people, and this time they introduced themself with confidence and ease. Same women. Same nerves twenty-four hours earlier. Completely different women standing in front of that lunch table. It was truly amazing to see them take our advice and tips to heart and make their introduction even better.

​Seeing their confidence grow and the connections that they made at the Paper Talk Mastermind Retreat has been something I haven’t stopped thinking about. This is why I made the retreat happen in the first place.

I couldn’t have done the Paper Talk Mastermind without Jessie from Crafted to Bloom’s and Sara from Handmade by Sara Kim’s help. All three of us mentor fellow artists and creative business owners as they build a full-time income doing what they love. We usually meet over video so members from New Zealand to Wisconsin can show up without a flight, but this year we got to bring a group of them to Seattle in person. It was incredibly special and will always be one of my favorite memories building this Mastermind.

​We opened the evening with a large welcome charcuterie board, and because I ran a catering business for years before I ever touched crepe paper, I couldn’t help myself. I made my own dips, put together a spread, and turned simple finger food into a whole experience instead of just cheese and crackers on a board. It felt like a strange full circle moment, using the skills from my first business to welcome people into the community built around my second one. We’d also stuffed a goodie box for every member, thanks to Aleene’s, Plaid Crafts, Petals and Pearls Design, and Kai Scissors, plus goodies from Sara Kim’s snail mail club.

​Then we moved everyone into their first networking event of the weekend. I had invited several of my entrepreneur friends, and our members practiced introducing themselves and their art to a room of local small business owners they’d never met. I wanted to give our members a safe place to practice their elevator pitch. One of the biggest lessons being a business owner has taught me is that the people you know matter more than almost anything else you can learn.

​On the second day, I could feel the energy shifting and felt a change in the air. We scheduled a lunch with Alicia Schwede from Flirty Fleurs and Rebecca Grant from New Creations Weddings, both long-time entrepreneurs and leaders in the wedding and floral industry. I created this second opportunity for our members, another chance to practice their elevator pitch. The difference wasn’t subtle. Both Cher and Sandy were more like themselves, quicker to laugh at their own mistakes. That shift, from the quiet and nervous to actually enjoying the room, is exactly what we built this retreat to create. That’s also why the Mastermind exists in the first place.

Because here’s the reason why Paper Talk Mastermind was created. This program was never about teaching anyone to make a better paper flower. Every single artist in this group is already talented, and if the art comes up, we’re happy to help, but that’s not the real work we do together. The real work is the business side: building a community that shows up for you when a launch flops, a client goes quiet, or you need someone to tell you the pricing spreadsheet is right. Networking is such a big piece of that because this is the room that will remember your name when it matters.

​We closed the weekend at The Dahlia House’s dahlia fields, wandering through the most ridiculous and gorgeous blooms while our members practiced getting comfortable talking to camera. It turns out a field of dahlias makes almost anyone look confident on video, and we walked away with more headshots and genuinely good footage than I expected. We ended the retreat with real conversations, the kind you only get in person, and a list of goals for the next time we do this because we are absolutely doing this again.

​Now we’re heading into a brand new session, and I’d love for you to be part of it.

​Registration for the Paper Talk Mastermind is officially open, and our upcoming cohort kicks off September 8th. Here’s what those six months actually look like: we start with finding your why and your elevator pitch, then move into promoting your work on social media, selling on your website and marketplaces like Etsy, pricing your products and services, and building a newsletter that keeps you close to your customers, before ending with reflection and long term goals. Every month pairs one strategy session with one where you share your progress live and get real feedback from the group and from the three of us, every other Tuesday over a group video call.

​We meet every other Tuesday at 6:00 PM PT | 7:00 PM MT | 8:00 PM CT | 9:00 PM ET | 9:00 AM the next day, Singapore | 11:00 AM the next day, Australia

​It’s $125 a month for six months, or you can pay in full and save $50.

​If any part of this sounds like the room you’ve been wishing you had, head to papertalkpodcast.com/mastermind and claim your spot before it fills up. I’d love to watch you become whoever you’re about to become in there too.

I was re-listening to episode 198 today, the one where Jessie Chui brought up imposter syndrome almost in passing, and it stopped me. Not because it was new information. Because of who I thought about the second, she said it.

​This season alone, we sat across from some remarkable artists and creative entrepreneurs, like Poy T. Granati, Carissa Wu, Margie Keates, Hitomi Gilliam, Karina Golindo, and Tiffany Windsor. Women with large followings, beautiful work, brand collaborations, and students all over the world. And every single one of them, at some point in one conversation or another, has told us some version of the same thing: I didn’t think I belonged here either, or I didn’t think I was good enough.

​That’s imposter syndrome in artists, plain and simple, and here’s the part that still catches me even after eight seasons of hearing it. It doesn’t discriminate by what you have done. We are all human. We all have our ups and downs, our own insecurities we’re managing quietly while everyone else assumes we’ve got it figured out. That part isn’t the surprising part anymore, not after hearing it from people who, on paper, have every reason not to doubt themselves.

​Here’s what I think actually separates people, and it’s not confidence. It’s what you do the moment after the doubt shows up. Whether you let it get you down, or whether you’ve built the habit of picking yourself back up. That’s the whole difference between the artists who fade out and the ones who are still here ten years later.

​It is hard to be positive all the time. It is hard to be the one who’s supposed to lead, to hold the moral compass, to show up steady when you don’t feel steady at all. Some days that just means tuning back into your own voice instead of the naysayers, doing the small daily habit even when you don’t feel like it, showing up because showing up is the discipline, not the mood.

​I’ve also learned that the nervousness, the not-knowing-what-happens-next feeling, isn’t a sign that something is wrong. Some of the best seasons of my life started with me being scared and excited about the same thing at the same time. Staying open, saying yes to a conversation you’ve never had before, talking to someone you’d normally talk yourself out of approaching, that’s usually where the next chapter starts.

​And people notice. Not the performance of confidence, but the actual showing up. Over time, the people who are positive and who do the hard work quietly and consistently are the ones other people want to help. You’ll be genuinely surprised by who shows up to support you once they see you’re really in it.

I bring this up because I’m sitting on something right now that I’ve wanted for a long time. I’ve been working on a project quietly, through more nos than I can count, until someone finally said yes. I’m not ready to tell you what it is yet, that one’s a Season 9 reveal, but I’ll give you this much: it’s tied to something I’ve wanted since the very beginning of Paper Talk, elevating and uplifting this paper community we’ve built together. I hope I’m making the right call. I can’t wait to bring you along for it.

​If Jessie’s comment on episode 198 hit you the way it hit me, go listen to the full conversation. It’s only a few minutes, but it’s one of my favorite moments of the season. And if you’ve got your own imposter syndrome story, I’d love to hear it. Drop it in the comments. You are not the only one figuring this out.

I am a big believer in books, in always continuing to educate myself, and understanding a perspective better when I can. A few things have shaped how I think about overcoming imposter syndrome as a creative entrepreneur. For paid subscribers, I’ve gathered the full breakdown, the exact passages, and the specific episode numbers where Poy and Carissa tell their versions of this in their own words, just below.

If any of this found you at the right moment, I put together the three books that shaped how I think about it, plus the exact episode numbers where Poy and Carissa tell their own version of this story, just below. It felt worth gathering in one place for the paid subscribers who want to go deeper with me.

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Nobody tells you that part at the beginning. You fall in love with the paper, with the slow magic of turning a flat sheet into something that looks like it was just cut from a garden, and you assume that if you get good enough with your hands, the rest will follow. It does not. You can be extraordinary at making paper flowers and still have no idea how to explain what you made, what it is worth, or how to put it in front of the right person at the right time. That is not a flaw in you. It is just a gap. And it is a gap I have spent years learning how to close, mostly the hard way.

That gap is the whole reason Jessie Chui and I started Paper Talk Podcast and Paper to Profit during the pandemic. If you had told either of us then that five or six years later we would still have members from that very first group, still showing up, still asking questions, still building something real, I am not sure we would have believed you. But that is exactly what happened. And watching it happen slowly, in real time, has taught me more about this business than almost anything else I have done.

Here is what surprised me most as we entered our third cohort. The problem has flipped.

When Sara Kim, Jessie, and I first started our paper flower business more than a decade ago, we had almost no information. There were barely any teachers, only a small handful of paper flower books, and no roadmap for turning handmade paper flowers into a profitable business. We were guessing, with no one to ask or talk to about the problems we were working through. Trying things in the dark and hoping they worked. Now, a lot of the people who come to us have the opposite problem. They are drowning in information. Too many trends, too many tactics, too many voices telling them what they are supposed to be doing on Instagram this week. Our job used to be handing people the missing piece. Now, more often, it is helping them see what actually matters so they can let go of the rest.

One thing has not changed across either version of that problem. You need people. Not just any people. People who understand specifically what it is like to make something with your hands and then have to figure out how to charge for it, market it, and keep going when nobody is watching. I have plenty of friends I can call. Very few of them know what it means to price a custom installation, or navigate a brand deal for handmade work, or decide whether a workshop that sold out should become the thing you build your whole next year around. That specificity is the entire point.

I want to share something with you, because it matters more than the highlight reel version of any of this. The mastermind is not for everyone, and it is not for right now if right now means you need fast results. One of our past podcast guests pursued a partnership with an iconic fashion house for three years before anything came of it. Three years. Jessie and I have been building toward this version of our business for more than a decade. It still took years to learn how to interview, edit, and figure out who we were even talking to. If you are looking for an overnight result, I will tell you honestly, this is not that. But if you are willing to do the long, unglamorous work of building something that lasts, this is exactly the room you want to be in, and we cannot wait to welcome you into our inner circle.

I think about that timeline a lot right now, because we are near a milestone that still surprises me. Our podcast is in its eighth season, and that season will close with episode 199. Then we open Season 9 with episode 200. Two hundred conversations. When we recorded the very first one, I had no idea whether anyone would listen, and now here we are, still talking, still learning out loud. Nothing about that happened quickly. That is rather the point.

What that room actually does is harder to put into words, so let me share the part I love most. We meet twice a month, and somewhere along the way, we added a group chat that turned into one of the best things we have ever done. Real questions get answered in real time. Someone tries a reel format we talked about and comes back two days later with actual numbers. That feedback loop, watching someone take an idea and turn it into a result, is honestly my favorite part of this whole thing.

And then there is the accountability, which I do not think any of us talk about enough. We are all professional thinkers about our own businesses. It is so easy to know what you should be doing as an artist. Actually doing the thing, emailing the client back, setting the workshop date, picking up the phone, that is where most of us get stuck. When one of our members had a workshop go so well that more people wanted in, the group did not just clap for her and move on. People started asking, ‘Did you email them back yet? Did you pick a date?’ That nudge is not pressure. It is care. It is what happens when the people around you actually understand what is at stake in the thing you are too nervous to finish.

That is what I keep coming back to. Most of us are not missing talent. We are missing a room where the people get it, where someone expects us to follow through, and where the long game does not feel so lonely.

We are talking about all of this, the evolution of the mastermind, what we have learned across three cohorts, and the honest version of who this is for and who it is not, on the next episode of Paper Talk, dropping July 16. Sara and Jessie are both in it, and it turned out to be one of our favorite conversations in a long time.

If anything here is landing a little too close to where you are standing right now, here is what is coming. Sign-ups for our next cohort open in August 2026, and the group begins on September 3rd. There is no need to decide anything today. For now, I would just listen when the episode drops on July 16th, and notice whether something in you leans forward.

That leaning forward usually means something. Mine did. Message me if you have any questions. Here’s a quick assessment test to see if our Mastermind is for you:

Is our Mastermind Right for You?

The hardest part of making this particular tulip is that the tulip itself is gone. It is not grown anywhere around the world.

​The Semper Augustus tulip is extinct. There is no bulb to order, no garden bed where one still blooms, no botanical garden quietly keeping one alive. To know what it looked like, I can only do what painters and collectors did four hundred years ago: study images, page through books, and chase the glimmer of a flower that lived almost entirely in paint. When I make this one, I am not copying a living thing. I am trying to bring back something the world lost.

​So before I take you to my work table, let me tell you how this flower came to be, and how it came to disappear.

The most famous flower that ever lived

The Semper Augustus, “always majestic,” was the most coveted tulip of the Dutch Golden Age. Deep blood-red flames feathering up out of a milky white base, with a smoky blue wash deep in the cup. Collectors called it the King of Tulips, and during the height of tulipmania in the 1630s, a single bulb was said to command prices that rivaled a grand canal house in Amsterdam, complete with coach and garden.

What made it almost mythical was not just its beauty but its scarcity. According to one account from 1624, only about a dozen examples existed worldwide, and nearly all were held by a single collector, widely believed to be Adriaen Pauw, a director of the Dutch East India Company and one of the most powerful men in Amsterdam. Pauw grew his prized blooms at his Heemstede estate inside a garden ringed with strategically placed mirrors, so that a modest handful of flowers reflected into what looked like a glittering army of tulips. Interestingly, he refused to sell to anyone and wanted to enjoy it all to himself. And of course, refusing only made the world want them more.

​So the Semper Augustus became a kind of impossible object: too rare to buy, too beautiful to ignore, and famous far beyond the small circle of people who had ever actually seen one in person. Most people knew it the way I know it now, through paintings, books, and images found on the internet.

Why did this tulip become extinct?

Here is the part I keep turning over in my head as I work.

​The very thing that made the Semper Augustus so breathtaking, those irregular flames that broke across each petal so that no two flowers were ever identical, was a sickness. We now know the broken pattern was caused by the Tulip Breaking Virus, carried from plant to plant by aphids. The virus disrupts how the bloom lays down its color, letting an underlying layer show through in those signature streaks. Growers in the 1630s had no idea. They only knew that some bulbs “broke” into glory and others stayed a plain single color, and they could not reliably make it happen on purpose.

​But the virus that painted the flower was also slowly killing it. Each generation of an infected bulb grew a little weaker. Broken tulips were less vigorous, slower to multiply, and harder to keep alive. Over time, a celebrated bulb would dwindle, its offshoots fading, until the genetic line simply withered to nothing. There was no way to save it, because the beauty and the disease were one and the same. You could not have one without the other.

​The cause was not even identified until the 1920s, long after the Semper Augustus was already gone. By then, all that remained were the paintings and the watercolor tulip books that wealthy growers once used as sales catalogs, the same kind of books I lean on today.

​There is a final, almost rueful footnote: broken tulips have fallen so far out of favor that in the Netherlands they are now essentially outlawed, because the virus can spread to healthy commercial crops. The flower that once cost more than a house is now treated as a contaminant. A handful of broken varieties do survive in the hands of dedicated specialist societies, and one old relative from the era, the similarly flamed Zomerschoon, is still grown. But the Semper Augustus itself disappeared silently, and we are left with its portrait.

​Which is, in a strange way, exactly what a commission like this is. A portrait, made in paper, of a flower no one can ever hand me.

Beginning at the center

I always build a tulip from the inside out, and this time the center is where I have spent the most stubborn, happy hours.

​The reproductive structure of a tulip is simple and tidy: six stamens ringed around a single central pistil. The pistil contains the stigma, style and ovary. But here is a detail that surprises a lot of people, and one I love. The color of a tulip’s stamens and pistil is not random, and it is not always yellow. It shifts depending on the color of the tepals (the proper word for tulip “petals,” since in a tulip the petals and sepals look alike). A red tulip tends toward near-black, almost purple stamens. A white tulip might carry bright yellow or lime. There is a whole quiet logic to it.

​For the Semper Augustus, with its red flames, that logic calls for a dramatic dark center, and getting that darkness to look real rather than flat is where this part of the project really began.

​I keep a chart in my book, The New Art of Paper Flowers, that maps tepal color to stamen color so the pairing always reads as natural. Below, for paid subscribers, I’m sharing the chart along with the full center-making process for this tulip: the media I tested, the exact papers I used, and the small fix that finally solved the stigma.

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A 1,200 Mile Drive with Five Paper Poppies in the Back Seat

The larger-than-life poppies were taking up most of the car. Five of them, each one thirty-six inches across, propped and braced in the back of my Honda CRV like passengers I had grown attached to. I had spent weeks building them for Caroline Tran’s studio photo shoot in Los Angeles, layering 180gsm Italian crepe into petals the size of large dinner plates, each wired so the individual petals could move and flow. Providing movement to each of the flower heads. And now I had to drive them down from Seattle. Roughly 1,200 miles. Two days on the road. A lot of mountain passes, a lot of stops, and exactly zero opportunities to remake a petal if something went wrong.

I remember standing in my studio the week before, staring at the first finished poppy, and realizing the problem was not whether I could build five of these. The problem was whether I could build five of these so they would survive the drive. That is the moment the whole project shifted for me. The petals were not the work. The petals plus the transport plan were the work.

This is the part of paper flower making that nobody really talks about. We talk about crepe weights, color theory, and how to cup a petal. We do not talk about the fact that a flower that cannot travel is a flower that cannot leave your studio, and most of the time, the whole point of making a flower is for it to go somewhere and be the focal point of the event.

Once I started thinking that way, the poppies got easier. Not easy, but easier. The first decision was that the petals could not stay open during the drive. A fully bloomed poppy that big has nowhere to go if the car brakes hard. So I built them to travel closed. I wired each outer petal down the middle and one on each side, just providing enough tension to hold it curled inward toward the center without creasing. In addition, the wire hidden between the folds of the poppies’ petals mimics the lifelike wrinkles of the poppies’ petals. When I arrived at Caroline’s studio, I could gently uncurl each petal by hand, and the poppy would open to its full thirty-six inches, exactly as I had designed it. The wire was thin enough that the petal remembered both shapes, the closed travel form and the open bloom.

The second decision was the stem. A single rigid stem on a flower that size is a liability. It cannot fit in a car at full length, and even if it could, every bump in the road becomes a lever working against the head. So I worked with Sara Kim to design and build collapsible stems. The flower head detaches from the stem via a coupling I made from a heavier-gauge wire sleeve, and the stem itself breaks down into two sections. I could pack the heads in one set of boxes, and the stems flat in another, and reassemble everything in minutes once I arrived.

The third decision was the packing itself. I borrowed a version of the system I have been refining for years on smaller deliveries. Each poppy head went into its own box, padded with crumpled kraft paper around the edges to absorb any shifting. The boxes sat on a no-slip rubber mat in the back of the SUV, with rolled towels wedged between them to keep anything from sliding. If I had to brake hard, the boxes would press into each other instead of into the seats. Redundancy is the whole philosophy. One layer can fail. Two layers usually do not fail simultaneously.

I thought about Sara a lot on that drive. On Episode 195 of Paper Talk, she talked about how downsizing her car forced her to redesign her giant flowers from the ground up. Heads that detach. Leaves that remove. Backdrops that break down. She said something that has stayed with me: that a collapsible design is not just a transport solution; it is a value-add for the client. They can store the piece. They can reuse it. They can move it to a different room or another event. The flower outlives the moment it was made for.

Jessie is also an expert in packing, but in a different way. Her expertise lies in art shows. Her packing strategy for art shows, where a piece might sell on the spot, has changed the way I think about boxes. The box has to be big enough to hold the flower, padding, and packaging materials, so the moment a buyer says yes, the piece can be wrapped and walked out the door. She labels every box, both with her brand and with identifying information, because at the end of a long event day, nobody can remember which box belongs to which piece.

What all three of us kept coming back to in that conversation was the same idea, just from different angles. The flower and the transport are not two separate problems. They are one problem, and the sooner you start treating them that way, the better your work gets. A flower designed without transport in mind is a flower that will eventually disappoint you, or worse, disappoint a client. A flower designed with transport built into its bones is a flower that can go anywhere.

This applies whether you are driving an hour across town, flying with a wedding bouquet, or shipping a piece via UPS to a customer in another state. The medium changes. The principle does not. Ask yourself: before you cut the first petal, where is this flower going, and how will it get there? Then let that question shape the construction.

Listen to more on this conversation, check out our recent Paper Talk Podcast, Episode 195 How Do You Transport Paper Flowers Without Damage?

For the poppies, that question saved the project. I drove into Los Angeles two days after I left Seattle, opened the back of the SUV, and every petal was exactly where I had left it. We assembled the stands in Caroline’s studio in under an hour. The poppies opened on cue. The shoot happened.

I want to leave you with the working tool I wish I had when I started doing this kind of work.

Over the past few years, I have built out a transport checklist that I now use for every piece that leaves my studio. It covers the questions I ask myself during construction, the packing decisions I make the day of delivery, the differences between local hand delivery and shipping via UPS or FedEx, and a separate section for the load-in chaos of workshops and art fairs. It is the document I would have paid good money for back when I was figuring all of this out the hard way.

Starting with this post, I am opening up a paid tier on Back to the Basics for readers who want to go deeper with me into the working tools behind the work. The Paper Flower Transport Checklist is the first resource available to paid subscribers, and it lives in four parts:

The pre-delivery construction checklist, with the questions to ask yourself while you are still building the flower.

The day-of-delivery packing checklist, for hand delivery and local transport.

The shipping checklist, with the specific differences for UPS and FedEx, and how to pack so that handlers cannot crush your work.

The workshop and art fair load-in checklist, for the days when you are not delivering one piece but setting up an entire experience.

If the poppy story resonated, if you have ever finished a flower and immediately worried about how to move it, the checklist is for you. Paid subscribers will also get access to the tools I build going forward, the resources I make for myself and refine over time, and the ones that turn the principles I write about here into something you can actually hold in your hand on delivery day.

I would love to hear from you in the comments. What is the longest distance you have ever transported a paper flower, and what did you learn from the drive? I am still learning from mine.

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I just spent five days teaching paper flowers at Snow Farm New England Craft Program in Williamsburg, Massachusetts. It was my first time leading a multi-day workshop entirely on my own, far from my studio in Seattle, and I want to tell you what I learned. Not just about teaching, but about what happens when you take your craft to a place where nobody knows you, where you do not have your usual setup, and where you have to trust that what you know is enough.

This post is for anyone who teaches, wants to teach, or has been thinking about it and keeps talking themselves out of it. Whether you make paper flowers, ceramics, textiles, or anything else with your hands, I think what I experienced at Snow Farm might speak to you.

I want to start by being real with you. I was nervous.

I have been teaching paper flower workshops for years. I co-taught multi-day workshops with my dear friend Jessie Chui of Crafted to Bloom and co-host of Paper Talk Podcast, including our Seattle Masterclass at Pine Creek Nursery, our two-day workshop in Toronto, and our six-month-long online series, Awesome Blossoms, which we taught during Covid. I have done solo one-day workshops in Seattle, Snohomish,, Camano Island, Lummi Island, the Los Angeles area, Waco, and at 12 Bones Brewery in Asheville. I have stood in front of rooms full of people and walked them through petals, stems, and leaves many times.

But Snow Farm was different. Five full days. Just me. No co-teacher to walk the room while I demonstrated. No familiar studio with everything in its place. I had to pack my entire teaching studio into suitcases and ship boxes of crepe paper across the country. I had to figure out what to bring and what to leave behind, and I had to trust that I would know how to fill five days with enough structure to guide my students and enough space to let them breathe.

If you have ever thought about applying to teach at a craft school, a residency, or a destination workshop, you probably know the feeling I am describing. That voice that says: What if I run out of things to teach? What if the students are more advanced than I expect? What if they are beginners and I move too fast? What if something goes wrong and I do not have my usual tools to fix it?

I want to walk you through what actually happened, because the reality was so much better than the fear.

What packing for a destination workshop taught me

When you teach in your own studio, you do not think about supplies. Everything is there. You know where every tool is. You know which table wobbles and which chair is the good one.

Teaching away from home strips all of that away. Suddenly, you are making decisions you have never had to make before. How many rolls of crepe paper do I actually need? Which coloring mediums work best? Can I check them in a suitcase? Do I bring my own cutting mats or hope the venue has them? What about glue guns, wire, floral tape, and reference books?

I learned that packing for a destination workshop forces you to distill your teaching down to its essentials. You cannot bring everything, so you have to decide what truly matters. And that process, as stressful as it felt in the weeks before, actually made me a sharper teacher. I arrived knowing exactly what I needed because I had to justify every single item in my bag.

If you are considering traveling to teach, my advice is this: start your packing list early, ship what you can ahead of time, and ask the venue what they provide. Most craft schools like Snow Farm have basic tools, even guillotine cutters, and various coloring mediums. You do not need to recreate your entire studio. You need to bring what makes your teaching yours.

Reading the room when you are the only teacher in it

In a one-day workshop, the pace is fast, and everyone is roughly on the same timeline. By day two of a five-day workshop, the differences among students become very clear.

Some of my students were fast. They picked up techniques quickly, finished steps ahead of the group, and were ready to move on. Others were slower, more careful, more deliberate. They wanted to get each petal right before moving to the next one. Both approaches are valid, but as the only teacher in the room, I had to figure out how to honor both without making anyone feel rushed or left behind.

Here is what I learned: the fast students do not need more instruction. They need permission. Permission to experiment, to try a variation, to start the next flower early, to help a neighbor. The slower students do not need you standing over them. They need reassurance that their pace is their own and that the beauty of a multi-day workshop is the time.

The more subtle challenge is the student who takes up a disproportionate amount of your attention. Not out of ill intent, but out of enthusiasm, anxiety, or simply a naturally inquisitive personality. If you’re not mindful, one student can easily absorb your entire focus while quieter students hesitate to speak up. I learned to intentionally move around the room, making a point to check in with the quieter students first before circling back. These small adjustments changed the dynamic for everyone.

The moment I knew I could let go

Somewhere around day three, I watched two students lean toward each other, troubleshooting how to glue a petal at just the right angle. They were not asking me. They were figuring it out together.

That moment was everything.

When you co-teach, there is always someone to catch what you miss. When you teach alone, you feel the weight of being the only source of knowledge in the room. But the truth is, you should not be. Your job as a teacher is to give your students enough understanding and confidence that they can solve the small problems on their own. The big stuff, the concepts, the design principles, the way a flower blooms from bud to full open stage, that is yours to teach. But the angle of a petal? The amount of glue? Let them find their way. Let them talk to each other. That is where the real learning happens.

I had to learn to step back, and it was one of the most important lessons of the week.

Why the conversations mattered as much as the flowers

One of the unexpected gifts of a five-day workshop is the time you have to learn why your students came. In a one-day class, there is no space for that. Everyone arrives, you teach, they make something beautiful, and they leave. But over five days, you hear their stories. Why did they want to try this craft? What drew them to crepe paper? What they hope to do with what they learn.

Those conversations changed the way I taught. When I understood what each student was looking for, I could tailor my guidance. Some wanted technical precision. Some wanted creative freedom. Some just wanted to make something beautiful with their hands and feel proud of it. All of those are good reasons to be in the room, and knowing which one each student carried helped me meet them where they were.

Why you should consider teaching outside your local market

If you are an artist or maker who teaches workshops, I want to encourage you to look beyond your local area. Here is why:

Your local audience knows you. They have seen your work, maybe taken a class already, and they have a sense of what to expect. That familiarity is wonderful, but it can also become a ceiling. When you teach somewhere new, you reach people who have never heard of you. You get to introduce yourself and your craft from scratch. And you learn things about your own teaching that you cannot see when you are in your comfort zone.

At Snow Farm, I was surrounded by other makers: woodturners, ceramic tile artists, flameworkers, collage artists, and metalworkers. That cross-pollination of creative energy was unlike anything I experienced at home. It reminded me that paper flowers exist within a much larger world of handmade things, and that people who love making things with their hands are drawn to one another regardless of medium.

Places like Snow Farm, Haystack, Penland, Arrowmont, and other craft schools across the country are actively looking for instructors who bring something unique. If you have a skill and a willingness to teach, there is a place for you. The application process can feel intimidating, but it is worth it. You will grow as a teacher in ways that local workshops alone cannot offer.

Resources if you are thinking about this

If the idea of teaching your first workshop, or your first destination workshop, fills you with a mix of excitement and dread, you are not alone. I want to point you to two episodes of the Paper Talk Podcast that I think will help.

Paper Talk Episode 33, “Overcoming Workshop Fears,” features Emily Paluska of Revery Paper Flora, who was so terrified before her very first workshop that she almost did not show up. She went on to become one of the most prolific workshop instructors in the paper flower community. Her story is honest, practical, and full of tips for anyone who is just getting started.

Paper Talk Episode 175 is a conversation among me, Jessie Chui, and Sara Kim, reflecting on lessons learned from teaching workshops and what it takes to build and sustain a creative community. If you are thinking about the bigger picture of how teaching fits into your creative life and business, this episode will give you a lot to think about.

You can find both episodes and subscribe to Paper Talk at papertalkpodcast.com. We have been having these conversations with paper flower artists and creative entrepreneurs for over 190 episodes now, and if you are not already part of our community, we would love to have you.

What I walked away with

Every single one of my five students walked away from Snow Farm proud of what they made. They shaped coral charm peonies, garden roses, and stephanotis vines. They learned how to arrange them. They used foraged fresh botanicals from the property and combined them with their paper flowers. They left with knowledge they did not have when they arrived.

And I walked away knowing something I had hoped was true but had not fully proven to myself: I am a good teacher. Not because everything went perfectly, but because I learned to adapt, to listen, and to trust my students to find their own way.

If you have been thinking about teaching, about traveling to teach, about stepping outside the safety of your studio and your local community, I hope this gives you a little bit of courage. The nervousness does not go away. But what you find on the other side of it is worth every anxious moment.

It was Japanese horticulturists in the 1930s who saw something in that wildflower that nobody else had. They began breeding it, patiently coaxing out new forms and colors over decades, until the single-petaled prairie flower became the lush, ruffled, rose-like bloom we know today. By the 1980s, Japanese and Dutch breeders had developed hybrid cultivars with larger blooms, more colors, and the kind of greenhouse adaptability that made lisianthus a global cut flower.

I love that origin story. A flower born on the American prairie, refined by Japanese artistry. And here I am, teaching it in paper alongside Hitomi Gilliam, a Japanese-Canadian floral designer whose own artistry bridges those same two worlds.

What makes the lisianthus so special

The botanical name, Eustoma grandiflorum, translates to “beautiful mouth, large-flowered.” The “beautiful mouth” part refers to the wide, inviting throat of the flower where the petals join. And once you see a real lisianthus up close, you understand. That throat, that depth, the way the petals spiral open with each one curving a little differently from the next. It is not like a rose, where the petals share a uniform curve. A lisianthus is more organic, more unpredictable. Each petal does its own thing.

The double varieties, like the light purple one I am teaching in the workshop, have layers upon layers of ruffled petals, with the stamens genetically converted into petal-like structures. It is a phenomenon called “petalization,” which gives double lisianthus its incredible fullness. But even in the densest double bloom, you can sometimes catch a glimpse of the center: a slender green pistil that splits into two distinct lobes at the top, like a tiny pair of wings, surrounded by a cluster of short golden anthers. It is one of the most elegant flower centers in the botanical world, and in my paper version, I made sure it stays visible, and I show you how I make them.

A farm in Kochi

In March 2025, I traveled to Japan with Hitomi on her Hanami Flower Tour. One of our stops was a lisianthus farm in the Aki-Geisei area of Kochi Prefecture. This family-run farm has been growing lisianthus for 40 years, and the current grower carries on his father’s legacy.

Walking into their greenhouse, I was completely awestruck. Rows upon rows of perfect lisianthus stretched out before us. 60,000 stems in a single greenhouse. 20 different varieties across the farm. But what struck me most was the level of care the Japanese growers give to every single plant. Each stem had been meticulously groomed and pinched so that five perfect blooms stood ready for harvest, destined for the flower market. There was no waste, no imperfection, no carelessness. Every plant was tended with the kind of quiet devotion that you can only truly understand when you see it in person.

Standing in that greenhouse, surrounded by perfect lavender and blush lisianthus, I knew I had to bring this flower into our workshop.

For the gardeners

If you have ever thought about growing lisianthus at home, I will not sugarcoat it: this flower has a bit of a diva reputation. The seeds are dust-like and must be sown on the surface, never buried. It takes about five months from seed to first bloom. And if you do not control the temperature carefully during the seedling stage, you risk something called “rosetting,” where the plant just sits in a flat rosette of leaves and refuses to send up a flowering stem.

But here is what makes all that patience worthwhile. A well-grown lisianthus will bloom from midsummer all the way to frost if you keep it deadheaded. And the vase life is extraordinary: two to three weeks when properly conditioned, with the buds on each stem continuing to open in stages after cutting. Your arrangement keeps refreshing itself for days. That is something even roses cannot do.

The paper version

My double lisianthus uses 28 petals of German extra fine crepe in lilac, built around a slender center that is quite different from the Princess Hitomi garden rose. Where the garden rose center is round and domed, the lisianthus center is tall and vertical, with a forked pistil that stands above a cluster of golden anthers. I used PanPastel in Bright Yellow Green Shade on the first five inner petals to create the illusion of that distinctive greenish throat you see in the real flower.

What I love about pairing the lisianthus with the Princess Hitomi rose and the Arabella clematis in our paper flower crown is how different these three flowers are. The rose is structured and quartered. The clematis is flat-faced and bold. And the lisianthus is somewhere in between: ruffled and romantic, with that organic quality where each petal curves just a little differently from the next.

Together on the crown, they create the kind of variety and depth that Hitomi always talks about in her floral design teaching. No two flowers do the same thing. Each one brings something different to the composition.

The workshop

This is the second flower in our three-day virtual paper flower crown workshop with Hitomi Gilliam AIFD. I teach the paper flowers. Hitomi teaches the mechanics, structure, and assembly of the ephemeral crown. Together, we guide you through building all three blooms and assembling them into a wearable crown.

All workshop lessons are recorded in full with lifetime access, so you can learn at your own pace and revisit the techniques whenever you want. But if you join us live from April 28 to 30, you will have the chance to ask questions in real time as we build together, and Hitomi offers a student review where you can submit your finished work and receive personal feedback.

If you are curious, you can find all the details and register at hitomigilliam.com/paperflowercrowns.

One of my favorite gardening elements to add to any garden is climbing vines, and clematis is at the top of that list. They bring such a vigorous, blooming energy to a space, scrambling up trellises, and they come in a multitude of colors that can complement just about anything already growing in your garden. They will add a fun element to your flower cutting garden. Plus, they come back every year.

I want to introduce you to a particular clematis that has become very special to me: Clematis ‘Arabella.’

A Flower That Tells Time

Here is what makes Arabella so enchanting. When she first opens, her sepals (which are what clematis “petals” actually are, but more on that in a moment) are a deep, rich blue-purple with a reddish cast. Over the following days, that intensity gradually softens, moving through shades of mauve until the sepals settle into a pale, washed light purple blue. If you look at an Arabella plant in full bloom, you will see three or four shades of purple and tinges of blue all at once, each flower at a different stage of its color journey. It is like looking at a watercolor that has not quite finished drying.

Arabella was bred by the British clematis breeder Barry Fretwell and introduced in 1990 from his nursery in Devon, England. She is a hybrid of Clematis integrifolia, which means she does not climb or cling like most clematis. Instead, she sprawls and scrambles, weaving through neighboring plants or spilling over a low wall. She has been nominated as the longest-blooming clematis of all, flowering from late spring through early fall, and if you cut her back after the first flush, she will rebloom in about six weeks. She is hardy, she is forgiving, and she is absolutely beautiful.

Wait, Sepals?

If you have ever looked closely at a clematis and thought you were admiring its petals, you are not alone. But what looks like petals on a clematis are actually sepals. In most flowers, sepals are the small green structures that protect the bud. In clematis, the sepals took over the starring role, becoming large, colorful, and ornamental. Arabella has six of them, each with a strong central rib and soft, ruffled edges. It is one of the things that makes clematis so fascinating to study as a paper flower artist. You have to understand what you are really looking at before you can recreate it.

Why Arabella for the Crown

This particular clematis was chosen to accompany the Princess Hitomi garden rose and the lavender double lisianthus in our spring paper flower crown workshop because it bridges the colors of these two beautiful flowers. The clematis blue-violet tones sit right between the cotton-candy pink of the Princess Hitomi and the soft lilac of the lisianthus, and she adds elements of flowy lines and airiness to the crown design that the rounder, more structured blooms cannot achieve on their own.

When you see all three flowers together on the crown, you will understand why each one was chosen. The Princess Hitomi brings romance and fullness with her quartered bloom and cotton-candy pink petals. The double lisianthus adds layers of lavender softness. And the Arabella clematis brings movement, those long, graceful sepals opening outward like a star, pulling the eye across the crown and connecting everything.

Making Two Versions

In the tutorial, I share how to create two versions of the Arabella: a darker, newly bloomed flower and a slightly older, faded bloom. By making both, you learn how to use PanPastels to capture that living quality of color that changes over time. Your finished crown will have the same natural depth and variation you would see walking through a real garden, where no two flowers are ever exactly the same shade.

The Workshop Is Next Week

Hitomi Gilliam and I are teaching our spring paper flower crown workshop starting Tuesday, April 28th, through Thursday, April 30th, with a live student review on May 9th. Hitomi teaches the mechanics and structure of the wearable crown. I teach the paper flowers: the Princess Hitomi garden rose, the double lisianthus, and of course, the Arabella clematis.

Here is what is included:

• (3) 90min+ LIVE & INTERACTIVE LESSONS with Hitomi & Quynh

• (3) LIVE STUDENT REVIEW with Hitomi & Quynh for 1-on-1 feedback of your Student Assignments

• (3) STUDENT CHALLENGES issued by Hitomi & Quynh at the end of each Live Lesson

• (2) STUDENT ASSIGNMENTS to be reviewed by Hitomi & Quynh in the Live Student Review

• LIFETIME ACCESS to Full Recordings of all Workshop Lessons, as well as ALL program resources (Supply Lists, Tutorials, etc)

• TECHNICAL SUPPORT - Enjoy complete technical support throughout the program, helping you through any problems that may arise.

If you have made one or two paper flowers before, whether through a previous workshop, a tutorial, or your own experimenting, you are ready for this.

Registration link: Paper Flower Crown Workshop at hitomigilliam.com

I cannot wait to make these flowers with you.

If you have ever looked at a garden rose and thought it was simply “pink and round,” the Princess Hitomi would like a word.

She is a quartered garden rose, which means that when you look down into the center of the bloom, you do not see a single spiral. You see four distinct sections, four hearts, folded and nested into each other. That quartered center is surrounded by outer petals that do the opposite: they curl under and outward, forming a layered array of starry points. So you have these soft, intimate hearts at the center, framed by bold, architectural points at the edges. She is gentle and bold at the same time, and that contrast is what makes her unlike almost any other rose you will encounter.

The bloom starts at about 1.8 inches when closed and opens to over 5 inches across over the course of six days. She carries around 85 petals in a pure, even cotton-candy pink, and her fragrance is lavender, moderate enough to be inviting without being overpowering. She is a medium to large rose with a very full bloom form, and because the pink is so uniform, there is nothing to distract your eye from the shapes her petals make. The color puts the architecture on display.

A Spring Reminder for Your Roses

Since we are talking about garden roses and it is mid-April, I want to pause here for a moment because this is on my mind.

I just finished going through my own rose garden this past week, and if you have not done your spring maintenance yet, this is your nudge. The first thing I look for every spring is black spot. If you see any leaves with those telltale dark, irregular spots, pull them off now. Do not leave them on the plant, and do not toss them into your compost. Black spot is a fungal disease, and those spores will survive in your compost pile and reinfect your plants. Put the affected leaves in the trash. I do this every single spring before I do anything else. It is tedious, but it makes a real difference in the plant’s health throughout the season.

Once your plants are cleaned up, it is time to fertilize. Your roses are waking up and pushing new growth, and they need the nutrients to support all those buds that are forming. I fertilize in early spring and then follow a regular schedule through the growing season. If you are growing garden roses like the Princess Hitomi, which are repeat bloomers, consistent feeding is especially important because the plant is working hard to produce multiple bloom cycles.

This applies to all your garden roses, not just the Princess Hitomi. But if you happen to be growing her, she is suited for zones 5 through 10, grows upright to about 3 to 4 feet, and rewards your attention with repeat blooms throughout the season.

A Rose Bred for Royalty

The Princess Hitomi is part of the Wabara collection, bred by Rose Farm Keiji in Japan, just a few miles from Kyoto. The Wabara roses are grown with organic fertilizer, without chemicals, and watered with tap water. The breeders believe that growing roses in harmony with the environment produces healthier plants, more intense colors, and a longer vase life. The name “Wabara” itself combines two Japanese words: “Wa,” meaning harmony, and “Bara,” meaning rose.

The Princess collection within the Wabara line was originally bred for the Emperor of Japan, which is why each variety carries a name with meaning. Princess Hitomi translates to “Beautiful History.”

She is exclusively grown by Alexandra Farms, a family-owned boutique grower in the Colombian Andes. If you work with cut flowers, you likely already know Alexandra Farms. They have been cultivating garden roses since 2005, currently growing nearly 80 varieties by hand across 50 acres. The Princess Hitomi has been part of their collection since 2019.

As a cut flower, she has a vase life of about 10 days, which is notably longer than many garden roses. She opens fully, a 100 percent bloom opening, and she starts arriving in bud form, so you get to watch the entire transformation over nearly a week. If you want to extend that vase life, change the water every two days and keep her away from direct sunlight, drafts, and any fruits or vegetables on your counter, since the ethylene gas they produce will shorten the life of cut flowers.

The Woman Behind the Name

In March 2026, Alexandra Farms formally dedicated the Princess Hitomi to Hitomi Gilliam AIFD, the internationally acclaimed Japanese-Canadian floral artist and educator. The dedication took place during Gilliam’s visit to the farm in Colombia.

[IMAGE: Close-up of the real Princess Hitomi from Alexandra Farms, or a photo of Hitomi Gilliam if you have permission]

I met Hitomi for the first time in 2018 at Florabundance in Santa Barbara. I was there to learn, and I was worried about how much I would absorb in such a short time. But Hitomi has a way of teaching that stays with you. Her floral mechanics lessons were so clear, so methodical, that when I returned home to Seattle after that workshop, I completed a floating paper flower installation for Fran’s Chocolate in just one hour. I knew exactly which tools to reach for and how to assemble the whole thing. That does not happen by accident. That is the mark of someone who has spent decades learning how to make complicated things feel simple for everyone else.

Hitomi’s career spans nearly four decades. She is known for her innovative mechanics, her generous spirit in the classroom, and her distinctive artistic vision. She is a champion of beginner florists, and she has built a reputation for meeting people exactly where they are and helping them grow. Of all the people in this industry who deserve a flower named after them, Hitomi is at the top of that list.

From Real Rose to Paper Rose

Last November, I had the honor of collaborating with Hitomi and her son, Colin, on a virtual workshop called Dusk in Autumn, focused on fall botanicals and ikebana arrangements. Working alongside Hitomi confirmed what I already knew from Santa Barbara: she makes everyone around her better, and she makes complex techniques feel approachable.

When it came time to think about our next collaboration, recreating a botanically realistic paper version of her namesake rose felt like the most meaningful way to celebrate what she has given to this industry and to me personally.

The paper Princess Hitomi is not a simplified version. She has 103 petals. She has a fringed stamen center built on a spun cotton ball, five hand-shaped calyxes with twisted tips, and three distinct petal zones that mirror the real bloom: the tightly swirled inner petals that build the quartered center, the larger outer petals with their reverse cupping and curled edges, and the slightly wider guard petals with tightly curled edges that give the rose her signature starry silhouette.

Building her takes patience. You have to study the way the inner petals fold and nestle into each other. You have to pay attention to how the outer petals curve back to reveal the quartered heart. Every petal you shape is a chance to tell the story of this beautiful flower.

What the Princess Hitomi Teaches You About All Garden Roses

One of the things I love about this flower is that building her teaches you so much about garden roses in general. When you understand why her center is quartered, how the reflexed outer petals create that starry shape, and how petal count affects the fullness of a bloom, you start seeing the structure behind every rose you encounter. A cupped rose needs a different shaping approach than a high-centered hybrid tea. A rosette opens differently from a pompon. The Princess Hitomi sits at a fascinating intersection: a quartered rosette center with reflexed outer petals, which is why we use two different cupping techniques to build her.

That kind of botanical understanding is what separates a paper flower that looks pretty from one that looks real.

Come Make Her With Us

Hitomi and I are bringing this garden rose to life together in a new virtual spring workshop: a paper floral crown collaboration running April 28 through 30, 2026, with a live student review on May 9.

Over three days of live instruction, I will guide you through creating three botanically realistic paper flowers: the Princess Hitomi garden rose, an Arabella clematis, and a double lisianthus. Hitomi will teach the mechanics of the ephemeral flower crown, covering structural framework, assembly technique, and the balance required to make a crown that is both artful and wearable. And then we will bring the paper flowers and the crown structure together.

This workshop is designed for paper flower makers who have some foundational experience. If you have made one or two paper flowers before, whether through a workshop, a tutorial, or your own experimentation, you are ready.

Here is what is included with registration:

Three 90-minute live lessons with Hitomi and me, pre-recorded paper flower tutorials, live student review sessions with personal feedback on your work, and unlimited lifetime access to all workshop recordings.

If you want supplies shipped to your door in advance, there is a registration option for that, too.

Workshop registration is $249 CAD, and registration with the supplies package is $329 CAD.

You can sign up and see the full schedule here: Paper Flower Crown Workshop with Hitomi Gilliam and Quynh Nguyen

I would love to see you there. Take your time with the Princess Hitomi when you build her. She is worth it.

I have tried to get a workshop and teach paper flowers on the East Coast twice. Both times, the workshops in two different cities, one in Philadelphia and one in New York, had to be canceled.

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Not because the flowers weren’t right. Not because the timing was off. The problem was simpler and harder to fix: nobody knew I was coming, or rather, my followers who were mainly on the West Coast did, but not on the East Coast. I didn’t have the right partner or audience for my paper flower market. I was counting on my own following to fill seats in a city where most people had never heard of me, and it wasn’t enough.

Those cancellations made me realize I didn’t have a strong following on the East Coast. It wasn’t just the lost income or the wasted prep time. It was the reminder that being good at something and being known for it in a specific place are two completely different things. I had to sit with that for a while.

I talked about this on the Paper Talk Podcast with Jessie Chui and Sara Kim. We talked about how workshops are run and how to promote them. What came out of that conversation was something I wish I’d understood earlier: filling a workshop is its own skill, separate from teaching one. And it starts long before anyone buys a ticket.

Here is what I have learned, from my own stumbles and from watching others do it well.

The most important decision you make is who you partner with.

When Jessie teaches in Toronto, she works primarily with city arts centers and cultural nonprofits. These organizations have something most of us spend years building: a mailing list full of people who already show up to make things. They print brochures. They send newsletters. They have a community that trusts them. When your workshop lives inside that infrastructure, you are not starting from zero.

The mistake I made on the East Coast was trying to build that trust with partners that didn’t specialize in the creative market. My Instagram following is mainly n Seattle and along the West Coast. My Substack readers are scattered. Neither translates easily into ticket sales in Massachusetts or New York without a local anchor.

This time around, I am partnering with a special venue that specializes in creating. From textiles to ceramics to painting. This is why Snow Farm feels different to me. They are not a general event venue. They are a dedicated craft school in Williamsburg, Massachusetts, with a devoted community of makers who come specifically to learn. Their students are already looking for exactly this kind of immersive experience. I am not asking them to discover paper flowers for the first time. I am offering a week of it to people already primed to say yes. That distinction matters more than I can overstate.

Your website has to do the work your flyers can’t.

Jessie made a point in our conversation that has stayed with me. When someone sees your workshop on social media or in a printed flyer, the very next thing they do is look you up. They want to know if you are real. Is there a website? Does it look like a working business? Where can they park? What will they actually make?

If the answer to any of those questions is a Facebook page or a broken link, you lose them. Not because they don’t want to come, but because you haven’t given them enough to trust the commitment.

Before I teach anywhere new, I make sure there is a clear, current page on my website or the venue’s site that answers the practical questions. Dates, cost, what’s included, what to expect. Not just the poetic version, the logistical one too. Both matter.

Email converts better than Instagram. Every time.

Sara said something on the podcast that I think about every time I feel discouraged about my Substack numbers. She has far fewer email subscribers than Instagram followers, but her newsletter conversion rate is dramatically higher. The people on her list are already invested. When she tells them about a workshop, they click. They buy. They show up.

Social media is where people discover you. Email is where they decide to trust you with their Saturday.

One thing I started doing after the pandemic is asking for zip codes when people sign up for my newsletter. It sounds small, but it lets me see where my readers actually live. When I am planning a workshop in a specific city, I can reach out to the people who are already nearby rather than sending the same message to everyone on my list. It is a small shift that makes your outreach feel personal instead of broadcast.

If you have been putting off starting your email list, this is the sign. You do not need thousands of subscribers. You need the right ones.

Know what kind of teacher you are before you step into the room.

This is the part nobody talks about enough. Filling the seats is only half of it. Once people are there, how you teach matters as much as what you teach.

I used to have a very soft voice in my workshops. I would quietly answer a question for one student and not realize that three other people at the table had the same problem and were too shy to ask. Now I make a point of opening my answers up to the room. I speak a little louder. I move around more. I let the teaching moment reach everyone, not just the person who raised their hand.

Sara brought up a good point when we were discussing this about a complaint after a sold-out class from a student who felt the pace was too fast. It was uncomfortable to hear, but she sat with it and learned from it. That is the job. You are not just transmitting information. You are reading the room, adjusting your pace, noticing who is falling behind and who is flying ahead. The longer you teach, the better you get at holding all of that at once. It takes practice and putting yourself out there.

I think about this a lot as I prepare for Snow Farm in May. With five days and a small group, I will have the kind of time I rarely get in an afternoon workshop. Time to slow down when someone needs it. Time to go deeper when the group is ready. Time to make sure no one leaves without understanding not just what they made, but why it works.

The workshop is the marketing.

This is the thing Jessie said that keeps coming back to me. For a long time, she thought of her workshops primarily as a source of income. Now she thinks of them as marketing, as the best possible way to get in front of the right people and show them exactly what she does and how she teaches.

Every student who leaves your workshop and tells someone about it is doing something no Instagram post can do. They are vouching for you with their own name attached.

The Stanwood Camano Arts Advocacy Commission tulip workshop and the Burien Library cherry blossom workshop both happened in March, one right after the other. Forty people made paper flowers with me over those two days. Some of them will come back to another workshop. Some will subscribe to my Substack. Some will tell a friend. None of that happens if I don’t show up and teach well.

Snow Farm this May is the same bet, just longer. Five days, a small group, one of the most beautiful craft environments I will have the chance to work in. If it goes the way I hope, those students will carry something from that week for a long time.

If you have been looking for a reason to finally say yes to something like this, and especially if you want to give someone you love the gift of a creative week together, this is a good one. A week at Snow Farm with your mother, daughter, sister, or closest friend would be something you both remember for a long time.

I still have a few spots left. I hope one of them is yours.

Read more about the week here Register at Snow Farm

Have you taught workshops before? I would love to know what surprised you most the first time you stepped in front of a room. Hit reply and tell me.

But this episode is different from the ones that came before. In this deeply vulnerable and emotional conversation, Margie shares what happened when the creative fire she had carried for over a decade started to fade and what she decided to do about it.

“I kept creating what I thought would sell the fastest, not what I wanted to create because I loved it and was excited about it. And I just got to the end of the year and I’m like, I don’t want to go to work anymore.” - Margie

After a year of chasing sales instead of creating from joy, watching her confidence erode with every collection that didn’t land the way it used to, and feeling the slow, painful disconnect from the art she once loved so deeply, Margie made the courageous decision to step away. She closed her shop, took a part-time marketing job at a local clothing company she had modeled for, and gave herself something she had never allowed before: permission to pause.

“Who am I when it doesn’t revolve around what I can create? I don’t know yet. But I do know I’m really, really grateful that I get to sit and internally reflect and figure out who I am.” - Margie

In This Episode, We Talk About:

• The slow erosion of creative confidence and how burnout doesn’t always look like what you expect

• Why Margie only posted six to eight times on Instagram in all of 2025 

• The rise and fall of her subscription business model, from 70 subscribers at its peak to closing it down

• How her identity became wrapped up in The Lovely Ave brand and the terrifying question of who she is without it

• Getting a part-time job after 11 years of full-time artistry and what that transition felt like

• The overwhelming response from her community when she announced her break (over 100 emails in one day)

• Considering a rebrand from The Lovely Ave to just Margie Keates

• Sara’s experience pivoting from bridal accessories to paper flowers after burnout

• Quynh’s health scare and how it forced her to slow down and reconnect with why she loves paper flowers

• Jessie’s beautiful reminder that your creative identity follows you into whatever comes next

• Why using AI as a business tool is something paper flower artists should embrace, not fear

• Kozo paper: what it is, where to find it, and Quynh’s quest to source it in Japan

• Finding joy in real flowers, gardening, Pilates, and the simple act of showing strangers your work at a store

About Our Guest

Margie Keates is the artist and founder behind The Lovely Ave, a Salt Lake City-based paper flower studio known for breathtaking crepe paper blooms and still life wall art. Over 11 years, Margie built a devoted following, a thriving custom order and subscription business, and a reputation as one of the paper flower community’s most inspiring voices. She first appeared on Paper Talk in Season 1, Episode 5, and returned in Season 3, Episode 80, to talk about imposter syndrome. In early 2026, Margie announced she was stepping away from full-time artistry to rediscover herself outside of her creative brand. She currently works part-time in marketing while keeping her studio lease active because she knows this isn’t goodbye.

Follow Margie: @thelovelyave on Instagram, www.thelovelyave.com on her website

The Best Thing We Bought for Under $20

• Margie: Trader Joe’s flowers

• Jessie: Pillsbury Grands! Deluxe Cinnamon Rolls with Icing

• Sara: Trader Joe’s Ranch Flavored Rolled Corn Tortilla Chips 

Paper Talk is supported by our community of readers and listeners. When you click on our affiliate links, we may earn a commission for qualifying purchases made through Amazon.com, Shareasale, or similar affiliate marketing programs. This commission goes directly into the maintenance of this website and our podcast. 

Listen and Subscribe

Paper Talk is available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube, and wherever you listen to podcasts. Don’t forget to subscribe and leave us a review! It helps other paper flower artists find our community.

Keywords: paper flower podcast, paper flower artist burnout, creative entrepreneur break, The Lovely Ave, Margie Keates, paper flower business, creative identity, artist mental health, subscription business model, paper flower community, Paper Talk Podcast, creative burnout recovery

Sara shares her daily filming routine and why she shoots the same action from multiple angles. Jessie breaks down her camera choices and explains why the person behind the lens matters more than the equipment. And Quynh reveals her favorite affordable tripod and why she upgraded her Canon for her book deal.

"Do a B-roll shot list of things that you want to capture because when you're filming, you forget you're thinking you're getting all this." - Quynh

Whether you're shooting with an iPhone or investing in professional equipment, this conversation is packed with practical tips to help you showcase your work beautifully.

Here’s What You’ll Hear in This Episode:

• Sara's complete camera setup and why she switched from Canon to Sony

• The importance of lenses over camera bodies (and which ones to invest in first)

• How to shoot multiple angles of the same action for dynamic content

• iPhone camera settings for the highest quality photos and videos

• Why natural light beats artificial lighting every single time

• The pre-production process: shot lists, prep work, and planning your day

• Editing software recommendations: Premiere Pro, Final Cut Pro, Lightroom, and more

• How to find affordable secondhand camera equipment

• The best tripods for overhead shots and easy movement

• Microphone recommendations for clear audio in videos

Equipment & Tools Mentioned:

• Sony cameras (various models) with GM 16-35mm wide angle zoom lens

• Canon DSLR cameras

• Fujifilm GFX 50S II (for professional photography)

• Viltrox 20mm lens (affordable option, around $100)

• iPhone 16 Pro Max with specific camera settings

• Rode shotgun and wireless microphones

• DJI Osmo and DJI wireless remote

• Greek Geekcraft tripod (extends to 7 feet with magnetic phone mount)

• Tethering cables for shooting directly to computer

Editing Software Mentioned:

• Adobe Premiere Pro (video editing)

• Final Cut Pro (video editing for Mac users)

• Adobe Lightroom (photo editing)

• Adobe Photoshop (advanced photo editing)

• Edits app (mobile video editing)

• Snapseed (mobile photo editing)

• Capture One (professional photo editing with tethering)

👉 The Best Thing We Bought for Under $20

• Quynh: KraftGeek Magnetic Phone Tripod 

• Jessie: TetherPro USB-C to USB-C

• Sara: Viltrox 20mm F2.8 

Paper Talk is supported by our community of readers and listeners. When you click on our affiliate links, we may earn a commission for qualifying purchases made through Amazon.com, Shareasale, or similar affiliate marketing programs. This commission goes directly into the maintenance of this website and our podcast.

There’s something special about coral charm peonies in May. The way they unfurl slowly, petal by petal. How their color shifts from deep coral to the softest apricot as they age. No rushing, no forcing. Just the patient, perfect moment when they’re ready to reveal themselves.

Claim Your Spot

This May 10-15, I’m teaching at Snow Farm: The New England Craft Program in Williamsburg, Massachusetts. Five days, a working farm, and a week built entirely around slowing down and making something beautiful with your hands. The workshop fee is $765, plus $140 for supplies. Accommodations and meals are available through Snow Farm. Registration is open now, and all levels are welcome.

I’ve taught workshops for over a decade, quick afternoon sessions, weekend intensives, and hands-on demos. And while I love them all, there is something a multi-day immersive experience does that nothing else can. You arrive with your shoulders up around your ears. By the third day, your breathing has changed. Your hands have found their rhythm. Your creative voice feels a little clearer, a little more like yours.

Snow Farm is exactly the right place for that kind of week. From the moment you step out of your car onto the dirt road, everything invites you to exhale and slow down.

We’ll spend the week making paper flowers, starting with the coral charm peony, one of my favorite flowers to teach because it never fails to surprise me. This peony is unusual. Most flowers follow a predictable color arc, but the coral charm deepens at the center and softens toward its edges, and as it ages, the whole bloom lightens into the palest apricot. We’ll study that gradient closely and learn how to recreate it in European crepe paper using layered tinting and careful paper selection.

A big part of that is understanding which paper to reach for and why. Italian crepe from Cartotecnica Rossi and German crepe from Werola behave very differently in your hands, and that difference shapes every decision you make about stretch, curl, and cup. The 180gsm Italian, for example, holds structure beautifully for a full outer petal or a large petal, while the finer Werola weights give you the softness and movement that makes an aging bloom feel genuinely alive. If you want to go deeper on this before May, I covered both papers in My Favorite Art Medium: European Crepe Paper and in the Werola guide. They’re good reading for understanding why we’ll make the paper choices we do during the week.

We’ll work through every stage of the bloom, from the tight bud to the fully opened flower. Each stage requires a different hand. A bud asks you to work tightly and in control. An older bloom asks you to let go.

We’ll take our time with the stamens and carpels, the parts most artists rush through. Creating this center piece will define the personality of your peony. We’ll build the stamen cluster with crepe paper, modeling clay, and wire, discussing proportion, density, and the small adjustments that took me years to figure out on my own. Wire choice matters more here than people expect. If you haven’t read B2B Toolbox No. 03: Why Your Stems Feel Wrong, it’s worth a look before we meet, so you arrive with a sense of gauge and structure basics already in your hands.

Join me at Snow Farm

You’ll also make supporting flowers, such as jasmine vines and garden roses, and we’ll spend time talking about scale and negative space, how the flowers around a peony make the peony itself feel generous and full. On our last day, we’ll arrange everything into a composition in a compote vase that you take home.

An arrangement that will last forever. And the right adhesive is part of that permanence. We’ll talk about which glues hold up over time and why, something I covered in B2B Toolbox No. 02: Let’s Talk About Glue. I’ll provide all the tools and materials for this workshop, which you can take home to make more paper flowers.

Each day will begin with instructions and a demo, and the rest of the day will be about creating. I’ll be beside you the whole time, adjusting a petal, sharing a quiet tip, helping you understand not just what to do but why it works. That is always the part that matters most to me. When you understand the why, you stop following instructions and start making decisions. That shift changes everything.

I’ve watched students arrive depleted and leave renewed. I’ve seen friendships form over paper petals that last long after the workshop ends. That is what a week like this offers. Not just technique, but the rare gift of time to make, to think, and to remember why you love creating in the first place.

If something in you is ready for that, I hope you’ll join me.

May 10 is arrival day. Instruction runs May 11-15. You can register now at Snow Farm’s website.

I can’t wait to sit with you at the table.

Register Now

"I feel like every year it repeats and it always starts in January and sometime in the summer for me when I go through these random moments where I'm like, do I need to go get a part-time job? Do I need to maybe change careers?" - Sara

This isn't your typical "boss babe" pep talk. We are three paper artists who've been in business for over a decade, sitting down to have the real conversation about what it takes to sustain a creative life. We talk about the pressure to look perfect on social media while hiding the messy truth, how motherhood changes ambition, and why finding your "why" is the anchor that keeps you from drifting when things get hard.

What You’ll Hear in This Episode:

• Why January brings existential career questions (and why that's normal)

• The uncomfortable truth about money conversations in the artist community

• How to balance motherhood and creative ambition without feeling torn

• Why your medium isn't your message and what is

• The power of having people who understand your struggles

• Writing as a tool for clearing creative space in your mind

• How to tell if you're moving in the right direction (even when it's not clear)

👉 The Best Thing We Bought for Under $20

• Quynh: You are the Brand by Mike Kim 

• Jessie: Find Your Artistic Voice: The Essential Guide to Working Your Creative Magic by Lisa Congdon  

• Sara: Start with Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action by Simon Sinek 

Paper Talk is supported by our community of readers and listeners. When you click on our affiliate links, we may earn a commission for qualifying purchases made through Amazon.com, Shareasale, or similar affiliate marketing programs. This commission goes directly into the maintenance of this website and our podcast. 

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JOIN OUR PAPER TALK MASTERMIND!

If you've been running your paper business solo and you're tired of figuring out pricing, marketing, and selling alone, then this is for you. The Mastermind is back and we saved you a seat!

Starting March 3, we are leading a 6-month Mastermind for paper artists ready to build something sustainable. You'll meet twice a month with us and a small group of paper artists tackling the real stuff: pricing, social media, selling your work, newsletters, and building confidence in your business.

We’ll have honest conversations, dive into practical strategies, and be with people who actually understand what you're building.

It’s $125/month for 6 months. Pay in full and save $50. Registration closes March 1.

👉 Join the Mastermind now!

We reflect on what happens when everyone’s work starts to look the same, why burnout often stems from misalignment, and how honest outside feedback can shift everything. We talk about naming our businesses to photographing our work, from showing up consistently to embracing life experience as an asset. 

“Hard conversations hurt, but they’re usually where the real change starts.” - Sara

Whether you’re early in your journey or years in, we hope our conversation offers perspective, encouragement, and a gentle push to evolve your art practice.

👉 The Best Thing We Bought for Under $20

• Quynh: Dungeon Crawler Carl

• Jessie: Benjamin Moore Paint Colour Samples

• Sara: Screenprinting workshop

Paper Talk is supported by our community of readers and listeners. When you click on our affiliate links, we may earn a commission for qualifying purchases made through Amazon.com, Shareasale, or similar affiliate marketing programs. This commission goes directly into the maintenance of this website and our podcast. 

 ________________________________________________

JOIN OUR PAPER TALK MASTERMIND!

If you've been running your paper business solo and you're tired of figuring out pricing, marketing, and selling alone, then this is for you. The Mastermind is back and we saved you a seat!

Starting March 3, we are leading a 6-month Mastermind for paper artists ready to build something sustainable. You'll meet twice a month with us and a small group of paper artists tackling the real stuff: pricing, social media, selling your work, newsletters, and building confidence in your business.

We’ll have honest conversations, dive into practical strategies, and be with people who actually understand what you're building.

It’s $125/month for 6 months. Pay in full and save $50. Registration closes March 1.

👉 Join the Mastermind now!