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Paper Flower Workshop with Livia Cetti

Paper Flower Workshop with Livia Cetti

Livia Cetti, floral stylist and paper flower artist at The Green Vase taught a potted Persian fritillaria plant workshop at Milton Market in Litchfield.

Jennifer Almquist

On Saturday March 22, Milton Market in Cobble Court, Litchfield welcomed Livia Cetti of The Green Vase back for the eighth paper flower workshop with her. Guests were invited to create a potted Persian fritillaria plant, and to be a part of the joyous community of The Green Vase workshops.

Milton Market is in a former 18th century blacksmith shop tucked into Cobble Court in Litchfield. Owner Martha Fish opened her “luxury general store,” in 2019. Her previous career in fashion included being an executive at Calvin Klein.

Jennifer Almquist

Livia Cetti of The Green Vase has forged a career based on beauty. A graduate of the San Francisco Art Institute, Cetti built on her Santa Barbara childhood love of flowers and became a floral stylist. After years working with Martha Stewart, she became a contributing editor at “Martha Stewart Weddings” and style director at “Brides” magazine. She began her own floral business in 2005, The Green Vase. A client asked if she could make some paper hibiscus as a Caribbean wedding cake topper. Thus, was born a creative blossoming using paper and scissors, a sort of aesthetic alchemy or magical transformation of simple materials into flowers that rival the beauty of the original.

The paper flower workshop at the Milton Market was fun, relaxed, filled with laughter, and the guests created stunning blossoms during the four-hour session. A giant sweep of forsythia blossoms set on a massive central table made a joyous statement that Spring had arrived. Participants enjoyed champagne and snacks. Bobby Graham of Salisbury, who recently left a career at Condé Nast, is about to open a shop (with his husband) in Sharon called Dugazon. He recalled the first Cetti workshop he attended at Milton Market as “kind of wild” with twelve people snipping and folding.

Livia CettiPhoto by Jennifer Almquist

It is a pleasure to watch Cetti’s hands work with skill and grace, informed by the thousands of paper flowers she makes each year. Her distinctive floral style shows up in the pages of “The World of Interiors,” “House & Garden UK,” and graced eight covers of “Martha Stewart Weddings.” Her website states, “All paper flowers are entirely hand-crafted by Livia and her small staff of talented artisans in the Bronx, NY. Each piece is meant to be an impressionistic gesture capturing the spirit of the flower, and just like the real thing, no two will ever be exactly alike.”

Check out Milton Market and The Green Vase on Instagram: @miltonmarketct and @thegreenvase

Jennifer Almquist
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