Watching Katy make casts is very cool. And you can, as she posts some cracking videos. One TikTok of her making a cast of a wedding bouquet had over 1 million views. Her studio is in the garden where she grew up. “My parents bought an old steading in Fife and mum transformed a concrete jungle into an amazing garden. That’s where I got my love of plants”, she says. Then a few years back her mum did a course on flower casting in London and Katy suggested she turn it into a business. Her mum wasn’t keen but she did teach Katy, who was selling her own embroidery at the time. When lockdown hit, Katy had already decided to focus on the casts more and moving back home gave her time to really get to grips with it.
It helps that her degree was in history of art, specifically 18c England and the casting of ancient works on the Grand Tour. These days she does a lot of wedding bouquets (including for Americans and Australians coming over to get married). She has to work fast, getting hold of the bouquets before they wilt, laying them out on clay, making an imprint, painstakingly picking out each tiny piece with tweezers before going on to make the plaster cast. She’s keen to be as low impact as possible. “Plaster isn’t the most environmentally friendly material, but my packaging is 100% recycled (I put out calls for old packaging on Facebook) and my paints are recycled tester pots.” She recently did a memorial cast of bluebells from a bluebell wood which was 1m long and while a previous job working for an online shop means she’s a packing pro, that one she delivered to London by hand.
