04/29/2026
This idea has been living in my head for months, and finally getting to see it exist outside of my brain felt really, really good.
I’ve always loved the relationship between flowers and fabric. It’s almost like a PB&J situation, they just make sense together. But instead of adding fabric into a design, I wanted to see what would happen if the flowers became the fabric themselves.
Asters felt like the obvious choice. They’re soft, a little wild, almost fringe-like, and when you start thinking about them in mass, they shift from “flower” to something closer to texture. Something you could almost run your hand over.
At first I thought about chicken wire for mechanics, but the growth habit of asters is too linear. It wouldn’t translate. So I started thinking smaller, if I removed the blooms from the stem, I could completely change how they behaved.
So I went snooping in my stepdads tool shed and found a roll of gutter mesh, and it ended up being the perfect mechanic. The grid held each bloom so snugly that I didn’t need glue or tape. Just press and place.
Once the structure was built and wrapped through the stool, I started placing each bloom one by one. Because of the way the mesh twists and turns, you get this mix of front-facing petals and the backs of the blooms, which created these tiny green dot patterns throughout. It almost reads like beadwork, or embroidery, and that detail ended up being one of my favorite parts.
I used about 5–6 bunches and built everything in the middle of a very hot Texas afternoon, so hydration was… not ideal. If I were doing this for a client, I’d absolutely refine the mechanics and prep the blooms differently. But for what this was, an exploration, it did exactly what I needed it to do.
And now my brain is already moving on to how to push this further.
Because there’s definitely more here.
