In Full Bloom: A Day of Calligraphy at the Cambridge University Botanic Garden

In June this year, I had the absolute joy of leading a full-day creative workshop — Bloom: An Introduction to Modern Calligraphy — at the Cambridge University Botanic Garden. Designed as a fun & relaxing introduction into the art of slow, expressive lettering, this workshop was part of the Botanic’s summer education programme and welcomed a group of twelve beginners.

Nestled within one of the most beautiful and botanically rich corners of Cambridge, the day unfolded not just as a learning experience but as a meditation on slowness, seasonality, and the quiet pleasures of analogue craft.

Image: Cambridge Botanic Website

Setting the Scene  

If you’ve ever wandered through the Botanics, you’ll know it’s a place that encourages a combination of exploring and learning with total relaxation; which is the perfect place for a creative workshop. Our workshop took place in one of the Garden’s education spaces, a bright and airy room with tall windows that let in lots of natural light. 

Each place setting was laid with care. I wanted every attendee to feel warmly welcomed into a world that, for many, was entirely new: the world of pointed pen calligraphy.

As any of you that have followed me for a while will know, I love the creative prep side of my workshops! For this one I decided to paint the paper table cloth with my trusty dagger brush & some floral & leaf shapes, it was over 10 metres long in total, so was laid out across the studio and done gradually (yep those are my fave Totoro socks I got in Japan...I love Studio Ghibli!) I encouraged the attendees to use the paper throughout the day to sketch whatever they wanted in preparation for their stationery designs.

This venue is a place I had always wanted to teach in, as it’s somewhere I’ve been to since I was little, and it was the first place I started doing illustrations for Sleepy Bee Studio back in 2019. The ‘Botanical Collection’ featured designs that were taken from ink drawings of what was in bloom in the garden. So from the moment I began setting up — unboxing penholders, ink pots, and wax seal stamps — I was so happy that I was finally getting to teach in a place that inspired my business from day one.

The Morning: Finding Our Flow with Modern Calligraphy  

We began with introductions over tea, coffee & biscuits (the studio has a very handy little kitchenette so everyone was relaxed from the start & could help themselves to a drink). Some had always wanted to try calligraphy but didn’t know where to start. Others simply wanted a day of creativity, to step away from their screens and spend time working with their hands.

Our focus was on modern calligraphy — a freer, more expressive alternative to traditional copperplate — and perfect for beginners. I always remind students at the start that modern calligraphy isn’t about perfection. It’s about finding your own style through letterforms.

We started slowly, with warm-up drills designed to help everyone get comfortable holding the pen and controlling the flow of ink. The first time you dip a nib and watch the ink flow across the page is always slightly magical — delicate, unpredictable, and immensely satisfying.

Soon we were working through basic strokes and letter shapes. There’s a quiet hum that often settles over a room when people are truly focused. You hear only the scratch of nibs on paper, the occasional sigh of concentration, the rustle of a reference sheet being adjusted. That hum carried us through most of the morning.

By midday, we were ready to bring words together and experiment with short phrases and quotes. We then did various stationery designs in keeping with our botanical theme, combining calligraphy with watercolour illustrations that I demonstrated. I always find with the workshops that there’s a mix of people that want to work to a set design, and others that want to go totally off-piste and use their imagination, and I am all for both of those ways, so I made sure to have both options available so everyone enjoyed their time.

A Garden-Inspired Pause  

Lunchtime arrived quickly, and everyone took time to step outside into the gardens. It was a lovely sunny day so the doors were opened and everyone was free to explore or to stay inside to eat lunch then go for a little walk. Most people had come on their own, and we did have some little groups of friends. I think that’s also what’s wonderful about teaching small groups is that it’s not intimidating to come on your own as everyone is very friendly and happily chats to each other from the start.

One thing that the organisers of the workshops did which I thought was a brilliant idea was to email all the attendee’s a few days before the event with a pdf of the café menu, so that they could purchase their lunch in advance, and the café team popped it in the fridge the morning of the event so that you didn’t have to spend half your lunch break in a very long queue!

The Afternoon: Wax Seals and Tactile Creativity  

We returned from lunch to begin the second half of the day which was a combination of calligraphy activities from doing tags & art to wax seal making.

There’s something wonderfully elemental about melting wax. The slow pour, the brief pause, the press of a cool metal stamp. It’s an ancient technique, once used for official documents and now reborn as a decorative ritual — perfect for letters, invitations, or simply adding a little extra to your gift wrap.

Everyone selected a few wax colours to play with — soft neutrals, dusky florals, botanical greens. I brought a variety of stamps, all inspired by nature: florals, leaves, delicate wreaths. Once I demonstrated the technique, it wasn’t long before a rhythm developed — melt, pour, press, lift, admire, followed by shouting out ‘Look how good this one is?!’ to the whole room when the perfect pour was achieved!

Some layered petals or gold leaf into their wax. Others began experimenting with wax marbling, twisting two colours into a bloom-like swirl or adding vellum discs featuring botanical patterns on them.

There was a lot of laughter in the afternoon — more conversation, more sharing. I noticed how, once the pressure of learning a new skill had eased, people became more playful. The energy in the room shifted from cautious curiosity to creative confidence.

More Than Just a Workshop  

What I love about teaching workshops like Bloom is that they become more than the sum of their parts. Yes, we learned the foundational strokes of modern calligraphy. Yes, we played with wax and stamps. But more than that, we created a shared space of slowness, creativity, and exploration.

If you were told by a teacher or someone else when you were at school that you aren’t creative, please forget that utterly ridiculous comment, as it’s not true. Comments like this said to you when you’re young will stay with you throughout your life (as I well know from getting my fair share of them!) However when people attend one of my classes, my goal is to encourage them to try to let go of that life-long feeling of 'I'm not arty/creative' and to show them how illustrations & calligraphy letters are a collection of simple shapes, and how to break them down into small pieces to make it more manageable. It's always the best thing to see someone amazed at what they have achieved in the space of a few hours.

Calligraphy is a slow-burn skill. You will not walk away from one lesson being able to master it, but this is true of most things, it takes practice, and it is so worth it! I have always offered with every person I’ve taught to help them if they ever need it, because I appreciate how frustrating calligraphy can get when you’re first starting out. So I’m on hand at all times to help you to learn the things that will help you advance faster than I did as I was learning on my own whilst running my business and developing new products. In your workbook you get an extensive list of products that I recommend so that you don’t have to spend hours searching for them. I give all the tips from what I've learnt over the years so that it makes it something you want to continue afterwards.

Several attendees told me at the end of the day that they hadn’t realised how much they needed a break — not just from work or technology, but from the constant stress of everyday life. That they had loved not thinking about anything other than what was right in front of them.

Calligraphy teaches you to slow down because you have to. The ink won’t flow if you rush too much. The wax won’t set if you don’t pause. These crafts carry their own tempo, and they draw us into a different rhythm. One that feels, in many ways, more human.

Looking Back (and Forward)  

Workshops like this are gentle but powerful. They offer a kind of soft resistance to our fast-paced lives — a way to reclaim time and creativity as something personal, tactile, and restorative.

To those who joined me on that warm summer day: thank you. Your openness, curiosity, and willingness to play made the workshop a joy to lead. I hope the pens and wax seals find their way into your daily lives — even if just for a few minutes here and there — and become part of your own creative rituals.

And to those who are curious about learning calligraphy, I encourage you: follow that curiosity. You don’t need perfect handwriting. You don’t need special equipment. You don’t need to listen to that person who made you feel like you aren’t creative. Just a willingness to slow down and let yourself be surprised by what you can do.

Interested in future workshops?  

I will be teaching again in 2026 at the Botanics, a Spring Bloom theme on Monday 13th April and an Autumn theme on Tuesday 13th October, both are available to book now via the Botanic website.

I also regularly teach public workshops at other locations in modern calligraphy, wax seal making, and other creative areas from painting to sketchbook journalling. I also teach private groups, one-to-one, and corporate teams.

If you'd like to hear about upcoming sessions, you can sign up to my mailing list here (scroll to the bottom of our homepage) or follow along with me on Instagram @sleepybeestudio. I’d love to welcome you into one of these creative spaces.

And if you’re ever near Cambridge, make time to visit the Botanic Garden. Let yourself be totally immersed in colour, scent, and nature. Who knows what kind of inspiration will bloom.