More from the Flower Factory

I’ve done a few more flower and leaf pieces today. These were cut a little while ago, not from watercolour paper, but from some white card with a slight texture to it – this cut quite well, but it isn’t as absorbent as watercolour paper so the colours aren’t quite as intense when sprayed with the Dylusions Inks, until I spritz them well with water and smoosh them in the stray ink on my craft sheet.

I sprayed two lots today – quite a large quantity of hibiscus flower pieces in two sizes, and one large rose, with a mixture of blue, turquoise, purple and pink sprays, and leaves in two sizes – lots of small ones for the hibiscus flowers, and some large ones for the large roses.

Here are the flower pieces. As with the smaller roses, the larger ones consist of five separate pieces and one leaf piece. I have cut these with more ragged edges to give a slightly different effect – they are adapted from Penny Duncan’s Rose Design, to look more like what she calls her Grungey Rose. The smaller pieces are the hibiscus flowers. I have got two more sets of rose pieces which I shall spray with another colour.

Here are the leaf pieces for each type of flower. The hibiscus leaves are cut as three separate leaves for each flower, which makes more work than the leaves that are cut as a single piece (like the large rose leaves at the top) – I may adapt the svg file along these lines to save work in the future.

As before, these flower and leaf pieces will be hand embossed before assembly.

Here are the background sheets created from these pieces. First the flower one. In this first picture you can see the flower pieces to the side, and my increasing circles stencil laid on top of the background in preparation for sponging away some of the ink.

The finished background piece, with some more of the purple ink added; I also laid down the large rose pieces to enable them to pick up a bit more ink, and after spritzing, I sponged the background again around these flowers so that I could get a bit more of the masking effect.

I luuuurve these colours!

Now for the leaf background. You will remember from my earlier post that I wasn’t very happy with the leafy backgrounds I created at that time:

I took the larger one and used it for spraying my latest leaf pieces, and liked it a lot better afterwards! This time I didn’t use any green ink at all, but sprayed first with blue, and then with yellow, which gave a gorgeous rich green.

I’m much happier with this!

One of my friends on the Black Cat cutting machine forum suggested I combine the flower making with the faux porcelain, and create some porcelain flowers! I think this is a brilliant idea, so I’m going to have a go (thanks, Gaz!). The roses are a non-starter, though, because of the way they are constructed, but some flatter, single-piece flowers would work well, I think – and maybe I could layer them. I’ll be cutting some new pieces for this, and for more coloured ones, too – and I may combine colour with clear UTEE to give a glazed effect… So many different things to try!