Brown Flowers for the Altering Project

Third and final colour scheme – naturals and browns.

For the lighter coloured roses, I began by painting the flower pieces with Antique Linen Distress Stain. I discovered the quickest way of doing this was to prise off the dauber top from the bottle with a knife and just dip the brush in. Too much faffing around daubing it onto the craft sheet or onto the flower pieces which tend to rip if you rub them when they are wet. I really hate the dauber tops on the Distress Stains!

Half way through this, I managed to tip the bottle over… I managed to scoop most of it up with a palette knife and then used the flower pieces to smoosh up the rest. I decided that I was too clumsy to be trusted with open bottles of Distress Stains on the desk, so from now on, I am standing the open bottle in a plastic bowl in case of accidents! A simple matter to pour it back into the bottle if I knock it over.

The other day online I saw some flowers with petals that were half-and-half in two colours and the effect was lovely, so I thought I would try this. The second colour was Pumice Stone. I painted this on fairly roughly as before.

Here is the set of light brown roses with the half-and-half petals. I am really pleased with this effect.

The other thing I discovered, doing these, was that it was quicker to distress the edges of the petals once the flowers were assembled. I discovered this because I made up the small roses and then realised I hadn’t done it. The result is just as effective, and done in less than half the time – a quick swipe back and forth over the flower with the blending tool and it’s done. For this I used Tea Dye Distress Ink.

Moving on to the darker brown flowers, here are the cut out pieces for two sizes of roses and some single-piece flowers. I used Gathered Twigs and Tea Dye Distress Stains for these.

The roses complete. They needed a little something extra so I lightly rubbed a little gold gilding wax over the petal tips and they positively shimmer! As usual, the photos don’t do them justice.

All the brown flowers. I’ve added a little gold gilding wax to all of them, and I layered some of the single-piece flowers.

The final touch was to add a tiny dot of gold Stickles to the centre of these flowers.

I’m not sure there’s much more I can show you on this project for a little while, apart from making a few single-piece turquoise flowers, but keep watching this space – I shall be working away in the background to get things finished.