Stepping out of My Comfort Zone: Flower Making

After watching bloggers with more expertise and experience than I have create beautiful flowers, I finally caved to the urge to try my hand at making flowers. I want flowers for the attic bedroom in the Bellingham farmhouse, so I decided to make them. I ordered two kits from ItsyBitsy. com and went to work. The first kit contained six pink tulips. 

 I followed the instructions, using a stylus to shape the petals into little tulip cups. I posted this on Face Book, only to receive criticism that tulips in arrangements are usually closed up. Excuse me, but there are tulip blooms that open up all the way. So I'm good.

I am not so sure that I like the black stamens, but then they are authentic, and I was criticized for them, too.

I was actually pretty proud of myself for accomplishing flower making.

Compared to the little dried flowers, the tulips have more character and look fresh and will look nice in the bedroom.

I also bought Queen Ann's Lace. I made those last night. I love them and I think they turned out better than the tulips, I think.

I used a tooth pick to put a dab of glue one each petal. They are very small.

I did not attach the leaves because they would fit in the vase. I'll glue them in separately.

At the moment, I am using a glass jar that I purchased in the jewelry aisle at Hobby Lobby. The tall tulips require a tall vessel. Flowers in floral arrangements should be 1 to 11/2 inches above the rim of the vase. These are plenty tall, then.

The Queen Ann's Lace adds fullness and interest to the tulips.

Making these kit flowers, or any hand made, hand cut flower is so time consuming, but a lot of fun and a good sense of accomplishment when you are finished. I will buy more kits and get better, but for those on budget there is another way to make pretty flowers. I purchased this packages of flowers at Hobby Lobby. They are pretty, affordable, and come in a number of colors.

In my stash, I have a variety of sizes of floral and jewelry wire. This one is a small floral wire.

I use my jewelry long nose pliers to twist a loop a the end of the wire.

Then I fold the loop down, perpendicular to the stem. The blossom will be glued to the loop.

 I squeeze out some tacky glue out on my work top butcher paper so that I can just dip the stem head in and then place it on the back of the flower. Simple. Clean.

The bouquet fits nicely in this little vase, but needs some help.

 When I put loose stemmed flowers in a vase, I often put a rubbernecked band around the stems to keep the flowers in a nice tight bouquet, so I wanted to do the same with this bouquet to create a nice bunch.

I used floral tape to weep the flowers together  to bunch them up. I also bent the end of the stems to create sort of a base that will rest in the bottom of the vase.

Now the flowers looked a little more natural.

Now they don't, so I worked with them a little more.

The wire for the stems is a small gauge and bends very easily, so it was simple to spread the flowers to a bit and position them.

I am learning more and more each day as I work with my minis. The other bloggers whom I follower inspire me and challenge me to push myself beyond what I think I can do. I learn so much from the blogs and from the Face Book Group, too. Thank your friends for your inspired work, sharing your mistakes, frustrations, fixes, and solutions. Your lists of materials and vendors are always so helpful an I have discovered good resources. Again, thank you.