Paper Flower Factory

Now I’m a bit more up to date with things, and the ATC swap is almost complete, I can concentrate on making some flowers. Judy of Judy’s Fabrications is swapping flowers with me – to see what she gets up to, visit her blog and take a look at the amazing OTT fabric flowers she makes, with all their glorious colours and beady embellishments! Can’t wait to swap…

Anyway, I find I’ve got a lot of flower shapes already cut (mostly Penny Duncan flower shapes – thanks Penny) so I’ve decided to make some of these up, at the same time experimenting with my new Dylusions inks.

These are the flower pieces sorted – they were all jumbled up in the two small plastic jars you can see at the back of my desk. Most of them were cut from watercolour paper, and there’s some regular cardstock mixed in, but they seemed to stand up to the wet treatment they were about to endure!

The rows of flowers are the 5 pieces needed to make Penny’s roses. The piles at the front of the desk are a mixture of different flower and leaf shapes which I can colour and layer together if I want.

After they were coloured, I left them for a couple of days while I was doing other things. They were then ready to be hand-embossed. It’s useless trying to do this if they are not completely dry because they will disintegrate.

I have just done the leaves, and as with the flowers, I created some backgrounds while I was at it – some mediochre-ly successful leafy backgrounds which may come in for something – I shall probably cut them down.

Because I didn’t want to wait for the leaves to dry, I dried them with my heat gun, using one of my home-made spraying booths. This stopped them blowing all over the place! (Actually, I think the time has come to invest in one of those wonderful quiet diffusing heat guns that don’t blow everything everywhere!)

When they were dry, I drew veins onto them with Pine Needles Distress Ink, taking the colour from the ink pad with one of my new nibs in its holder.

Here are the leaves being embossed:

and completed.

I love the variegated colours of them! One or two have picked up a bit of the pink/purple inks that I hadn’t wiped off my mat, adding a bit more interest!