Guest Workshop with Botanica & Field at The River Shop

Class Duration : 3 hrs

This hands-on workshop at The River Shop is led by guest teacher Botanica & Field, whose practice centres around nature-led making and thoughtful resin flower preservation. Designed for beginners and curious creatives, the session offers a grounded introduction to preserving flowers in resin, combining botanical knowledge with practical resin techniques.

Guests will work with flowers grown and harvested on a family farm in Suffolk, carefully dried and prepared before being brought to London. This journey from land to studio is central to the workshop, reflecting the slower, more intentional approach required for successful bouquet preservation and long-lasting resin pieces.

The session begins by exploring how flowers are preserved using silica. You’ll learn why this method is essential when preserving flowers in resin, how it helps retain colour and structure, and which blooms are best suited for encapsulation. Understanding this stage is key to achieving clarity and longevity in professional resin flower preservation.

From there, the focus moves to cleaning and preparing dried flowers for resin. This often-overlooked stage plays a crucial role in the final outcome. Guests will learn how to gently remove residual silica, assess readiness, and handle delicate botanical material with care — all foundational skills for larger bouquet preservation projects at home.

Once the flowers are prepared, guests are introduced to resin itself. The workshop covers how resin behaves, how to mix safely, and how to pour with confidence. You’ll learn about curing stages, managing bubbles, and positioning flowers in resin for balance and visual impact. These techniques demystify the process and make preserving flowers in resin accessible, even for first-time users.

With guidance, each guest will encapsulate their flowers into a mould, creating either a paperweight or slightly larger keepsake (depending on the mould used). Because resin flower preservation happens in stages, you will also work on a pre-cured demonstration piece to complete the later steps of the process within the same session. This allows you to learn and practice the full start-to-finish workflow from base layer through to final pour in one class.

While we won’t preserve a full bouquet during the session, the techniques and staged process you learn directly apply to larger-scale bouquet preservation projects at home. The focus is on building the skills, confidence, and technical understanding needed to preserve meaningful flowers in resin independently.

Because resin flower preservation is a slow and considered process, each piece is allowed the time it needs to cure fully. Guests receive a finished resin piece once complete and, more importantly, the knowledge required to continue preserving flowers in resin beyond the workshop.

This collaboration brings together The River Shop’s ethos of craftsmanship and learning-through-making with Botanica & Field’s deep connection to land, flowers, and sustainable creative practice. Guests leave with practical skills, creative confidence, and a deeper understanding of how to transform fragile blooms into lasting keepsakes through preserving flowers in resin.

✅ Guest will get

– Hands-on experience placing flowers into silica gel and learning the flower-drying process
– Guidance working with professionally pre-dried flowers for resin casting
– Step-by-step tuition in casting a floral resin cube
– The opportunity to design and create a botanical resin cube
– Insight into resin curing, demoulding, and finishing techniques
– Their finished resin cube cured, demoulded, and posted after the workshop
– All materials, tools, and PPE
– Optional upgrade: wooden LED light base

✅ Guest will bring

– A drink/refreshments
– Old clothes or something you don’t mind getting a little messy