Wednesday 26 June 2013

Making Miniature Flowers


So it was bad weather yesterday, and the bad weather culminated in an 8-hour power blackout, starting at suppertime. I spent the afternoon and evening making up flower kits to go with last year's Camp MiniHaHa project, until the light failed. I made up some more today, old kits I had lying around and had never done. The hollyhocks and sunflowers were made last fall, the smaller flowers were the product of two days' work. All but one kit came from CMHH, these were produced by Adrian the Flower Lady and her friend Elizabeth: left to right, back row first; campanula (which will have to be planted closer to the ground), gaillardia or blanket-flower, daisies (more leaves needed) then front row left to right: pansies (a gift from someone, I like my way of making pansies better), stokesia or aster, and dianthus or pinks.

I coloured the pinks foliage with a white pencil as it needed to be grayer. The campanula (I have two varieties of them in the real-life garden) had the upper points of their petals recurved to increase the bell shape. I used paint thickened with texture builder to build up the centres of the gaillardia, stokesia and daisies, then dipped them in glue, and then in coloured decorative sand to make them slightly bigger. The centres of the gaillardia were then edged in maroon around the yellow, using a marker pen. Google Images are great for close-ups of garden flowers that are not in my own garden.

This is my nursery bed, i.e. the plants will go into the actual miniature garden in a rather more naturalistic way than they are here. The colours work pretty well together. I need some intermediate-size flowers, peonies kind of appeal for that. As this garden is purely imaginary, I can have things blooming out of season, so maybe some hydrangea, zinnias, moss phlox, petunias and other things will add to the cottage garden feel.

Tiny paper blooms helped to brighten up the last two days quite nicely!

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