Spring has finally and most definitely sprung during May (and has seemingly jumped straight to summer based on this past weekend) and all the flowers are now out in the garden so what better to thing to practice this week than florals.
I have been mulling over the pros and cons of encased florals over raised florals and plumped for making the raised ones this week. I found what looked to be a really good tutorial at http://coloraddictionblog.blogspot.com but inevitably it was going to cost money and as I am moving house in July then I am saving the pennies. So I looked around a bit more on the web and found that the author had put a very condensed version of the tutorial on something called “AngryMandrel”. I have trimmed it out a bit and put it into a readable and more user-friendly format and have been working off that to make my raised floral beads and is available through my website on the links page. I am dead chuffed with my efforts as the author said it took her a year of working on them to be happy with them - perhaps I am just not that much of a perfectionist! I found it really useful as all my previous attempts had become encased florals as my blobs basically sank before I could shape the petals!
And a good trick that I discovered was that between each “press” of the petals if I dipped my tungsten pick (my tool of choice for shaping the petals) into the water before moving on to the next petal then it would cool the pick enough to prevent the next petal sticking to it and possibly ruining the bead.
So now I am going to go outside and water my plants so that they look as lush of the ones I have made this afternoon!
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