Plants and flowers

I made my first miniature plants many years ago, when I first started miniature-making, and as with most other early endeavours, I cannot but find them pathetic although I was quite proud at the time. I have since made various flowers and plants, including a florist shop, which I still have although there is little left of the original flowers. I also once shared a long blog post about how it took me eight hours to make a geranium, which I carelessly titled "Why are handmade miniatures so ridiculously expensive?" One harsh comment to that post was: "If you ask this question there is no point explaining". Me: "Well, that's the point of my blog post". Opponent: "I don't read blogs" (that is, they only read the title). My point was that even with the minimum hourly wage and not even taking supplies into consideration, the true value of a miniature is far above the price you can ask for it. Unless, of course, you are Very Famous. 

I have made many geraniums since then; they do take a lot of time and effort, but it's fun and highly satisfactory, if you don't have to make a living out of them. 

I made many different flowers recently, and I will show some, explaining how I made them. I won't explain the geraniums again - read the old post, linked above. 

I also made some hydrangeas: the technique is more or less the same, although the flowers and the leaves are slightly different. 

Around Christmas, I made an amaryllis, which was a lot of work, but I was pleased with the result. 

I also made cyclamens and poinsettias, using my new set of punches, which of course makes life easier. 

That said, even with punches, it is a lot of work, because, as I explained in the geranium blog, each petal and leaf has to be moistered and crunched, otherwise they don't look natural, and some need a touch of paint to look real. 

For flower pots I mostly use recycled materials, such as bottle and toothpaste tube caps that I sometimes paint to resemble terracotta or whatever. Occasionally I have used wooden candle holders from hobby shops. 

I made some generic daisies, using sewing pins for stems, with the head painted yellow. 

I made quite a few generic plants out of various artificial flowers from thrift shops. They always have to be trimmed and painted, otherwise they don't look natural. (Perhaps they still don't look natural, but at least approximating natural). 

I made several bonsai trees, following a tutorial on YouTube. It is a lot of work. Wire for branches, covered with polymer clay and baked; then small ovals of organdy (I cut up a souvenir bag) covered, in this case, with moss cuttings, but you can also use shredded paper or thread. 

My son-in-law 3-D printed tiniest flower pots for me, just 1 cm tall, that I painted in terracotta and made teeny-tiny generic flowers as well as spider plants.

You need very small punches for this scale, and the leaves for spider plants I cut manually from coloured paper. 

My most recent horticultural achievement is a buxbom topiary. For it, as for some other plants, I made planters from egg cartons

It's fun making plants, and there is no limit for what you can make. I know I need to learn to make everything smaller still, so there is room for improvement. 

From coffee pods to flower pots

Some time ago I visited a friend who used coffee pods to make coffee. I have heard about them, and I have heard that miniature-makers find them useful, but I had never seen one. My friend was utterly perplexed when I asked whether I could collect the used ones. I wasn't sure exactly what I could make from them, because they are different from milk containers, slightly convex.

But I was sure that I would think of something, and I was also eager to show my friend what a valuable contribution to my miniature-making she had made. So this past weekend I started exploring the potential of used coffee pods.

My first thought was buckets, like I make from milk containers. The bottom can be easily bent inwards, and it doesn't matter that there is a hole. However, they have large brims that don't look natural for a bucket. Flower pots was the next option, and although they are twice the size of a 1:12 flower pot, I thought they could be planters or larger tubs.I wanted them to look like terracotta, but I am not very good at mixing paint. I should have added more red. Still, I was quite pleased.

While I was at it, I also painted a nasal spray bottle cap that had been waiting for this transformation for a long time. It is more like a flower pot in size and in shape.

Then of course I had to make plants. First of all, I made a simple fern, using florist wire and tape and painting the leaves with a lighter shade of green for effect. Then I constructed a weird plant from plastic Christmas decorations, but as I was passing the kitchen to clean my brushes, I suddenly saw that I had a plant with exactly that shape of leaves. (It is not my plant, so I am not on friendly terms with it). It also needed some painting, and the result was, if I may say so myself, stunning. I don't know the name of this plant so maybe someone can tell me. After that, I made the third plant by cutting up a 1:1 plastic twig.

For the smaller pot, I made a geranium. I will not describe the process because I have done it before, but I can confirm that it took about six hours and that the twelve stems contain 240 individual petals curled while wet one by one. Since I don't have my punches at the moment, I cut the leaves from florist tape and painted a bit here and there for variety.

So here is the result of my weekend:

Last in the picture is another milk canister I made from an eye-drop bottle.

This was a hugely productive weekend, don't you think?

Flower basket #2

In my previous post I said I would not show how I made flowers for the hanging baskets, but I have come up with a couple of new ideas that I want to share. Maybe they are not new at all, in which case you will just get a confirmation that the methods work.

As I have said repeatedly, I am not interested in making more of the same. I could have simply covered the other two baskets with my paper daisies, but that wouldn't have been much of a challenge. I tried punching red tissue paper, but it was too thin and just got crumpled. Then I thought that I could make roses from red tissue paper. I have made roses from oven-baked clay, but they would be too heavy for a basket. The tissue paper is, as you see, a paper crown I have been saving from Christmas. I save everything, and I have made fires with red and orange tissue paper. But now, roses.

This is what I did. Again, maybe it is a well-known method, but I haven't seen it. I wrapped a piece of paper round a length of dowel that I just happened to have in front of me - anything suitable will do. Then I cut off the excess of paper leaving 1mm that I then twisted and flattened. Then I pushed about 3mm of the paper from the dowel and cut off. Here are your little roses, ready to be glued onto your basket. (Or I guess you can add stems). 

It was easy to shape the flowers with tweezers before gluing.

I showed in the previous post what I used for basket.

So far so good. Again, I could have added some white and pink daisies, but I had been looking at various images and suddenly felt an urge to make some fuchsias. There are several tutorials on Pinterest about making paper fuchsias, in easy languages such as Spanish and Dutch, and all of them use punches. If I continue to make flowers and flower shops, I may invest in more punches, but at the moment I didn't have one required to make fuchsias. But I decided to make some anyway.

I punched out some five-petal flowers and some circles from appropriately coloured paper. Making holes in the middle curled them already, but I had to curl the inside bits slightly more. For stems, I used teeny tiny stamens from a full-size paper rose the origin of which I cannot remember. It was hard work because the flowers are so small. I put a ruler in the picture to give the sense of scale. 

Frankly, I didn't have the patience to make more than these even though I have more petals. I had to curl the outside petals back a bit more. I have a magnifying glass, but it doesn't combine well with my eyeglasses.

I like the result. The fuchsias are actually hanging over the side.

Then I simply added some generic pink flowers here and there.

Here the second basket joins the first one. In this picture, I have also made some improvements, adding mouldings and arranging the display in a more interesting way.

I will make at least one more basket, and maybe I will add a shelf, some posters, rolls of wrapping paper? The back wall looks too bare. I am enjoying myself.

Flower basket

My recent post in which I reflected over the amount of time and energy required for miniature-making has had a record number of views, but to my surprise also led to many indignant comments on Facebook. Apparently some people had not read the blog, just the title, thinking that I was outraged by pricing. Some comments said: "If you ask this question you will not understand the answer", or "Try for yourself and you'll see" (which is exactly what I did in the blog). When I asked one of the critics whether they had read my blog, they replied: "I don't read blogs". To be fair, I also got some praise from people who had read the blog.

Anyway, I decided to repeat the experiment today, without asking rhetorical questions in the blog title. For my florist shop, I want some hanging baskets because they will look nice in the foreground, and I had never made a hanging basket, so it's about time.

I found a good tutorial, but almost from start I adjusted it to my materials and methods. I had previously made topiaries, and I thought I could use the same technique for a ball-shaped basket arrangement. So I painted three felt balls green.

I abandoned my principle of making just one item to test because I wanted to clock my work, and also because I had three thingies I thought would make good baskets. (They didn't - more below).

The tutorial prescribes moss for the basket, but I don't have moss and I like recycling so I used a green fruit net I had been saving for the occasion.

Then it was just a matter of covering the balls with glue and dipping into a bowl of "moss". People always ask what kind of glue - ordinary all-purpose PVA. Up to this point, it took me an hour.

While the balls were drying I started making flowers. The tutorial does not show how to make flowers, and I won't show it either, because I have already shown some techniques in a previous post.

In a hanging basket, you have a mix of flowers so I made a little of everything, and I also cheated and used an old plant I am no longer happy with, made from grated hard foam. It looks like a generic flower and is easy to just glue on.

Meanwhile, I tried several constructions for baskets. I took pictures, but since none of my ideas worked there is no point in sharing. This was learning time, a lot of it, as I tried this and that, painted, decorated with stencils, even considered making real baskets from string, and I cut chains and found chain links, and then as I was looking for something I suddenly saw perfect hanging baskets, all ready to use. This is what happens when you have your miniature glasses on.

After that, it was just patience, and patience takes time. Gluing on flowers, making leaves. And I only finished one of the three baskets. I believe it took at least two more hours. Bit it was worth the trouble. Don't you think?

Why are handmade miniatures so ridiculously expensive?

 

I am sure all of you have at some point asked this question. I don't make things for sale, so I have never had to decide how much my work is worth, but I have seen what other people ask, and sometimes I wonder who is prepared to pay these fancy prices for a basket, or a crocheted antimacassar or a fluffy cat. But obviously people do, and obviously they see a value in a unique item.

Making flowers for my florist shop has been a good reminder of how much time and effort goes into a single object. As I am not interested in make more of the same, I decided to try and make a geranium (aka pelargonium) because I have seen them made by people I know personally, and they are not gods, so I thought if they can... I found this tutorial that proved helpful, even though I adapted it a bit, and since it looked tremendously time-consuming I decided to see how much time it would actually take to make a bunch.

I started with just one stem, to see a) whether it worked b) whether I liked the result c) whether I was prepared to repeat it.

Well, it sort of looked what it was supposed to look like, and it took the time it took. So I embarked on a larger scale. The flower pot in the tutorial has eleven flowers, so I cut ten stems and attached beads to them for heads - this is the first short cut I took.

I thought that if I used pink beads it wouldn't matter if it was slightly visible. I was right.

The tutorial says you need 15 petals per flower so next I punched 150 petals over a wet kitchen towel (go back to the tutorial to see what I am doing).

No shortcuts here: each petal had to be curled individually. And before that, picked up, one by one, with tweezers.

I don't have the tools recommended in the tutorial so I simply used the end of a small painting brush. The foam is a coaster upside down.

And here are my 150 curled petals.

Of course it took considerably less time than with the first stem, because I knew how to do it, and also because I did it step by step, not on a conveyor belt precisely, but surely faster than if I made one flower at a time from beginning to end.

Then it was the precision work of gluing the petals. I like this kind of tasks because they need total concentration, and I cannot think about my students' theses, or the journal review I need to write, or even what we are having for dinner. My children often wonder why I don't listen to music while making miniatures, but I tried and found it distracting.

15 petals per flower turned out to be inadequate estimate, so I only made six flowers. All in all, from a piece of paper and some wire to six flowers, it took about two hours.

And you can see how much better the new flowers are compared with the first one. So I think I need to add at least an hour of learning time.

But the project is far from finished. Flowers insist on having leaves, and pelargonium leaves are very prominent, and I don't have a punch. So I will have to cut them out, as I did with daffodils and irises. The tutorial suggests two-three leaves per stem plus some filler leaves. Twenty maybe? And the paper needs to be painted with several shades of green to look natural. 

Some hours later: 

 

I think this is the best miniature I have ever made from scratch.  

So all in all, how much would this project be worth? Even calculating with a minimum wage, there are hours of work in it, and that's not counting materials and tools. Of course, if I had had a punch it might have been faster, but not a lot faster. And each leaf is unique. I would say, a full day of work. How much would you be prepared to pay for it?

Florist shop

If you have followed my blog for some time you may have noticed that I easily become obsessed by my projects. One time I made all kinds of things from junk jewellery and fans. Another time I spent a week or so making wooden crates. Or miniature books. Or candles. Or curtains. Or shoes. Or whatever. I don't make anything for sale, and I am not much interested in making many of the same, but I like to explore various ways of making the same or similar things.

A couple of weeks ago I started making some flowers and after making paper flowers I made some from oven-baked clay:

 

I was quite proud of them to begin with, but then I realised - it also so happened that I had bought real tulips for a friend - that tulips are always hidden in leaves, and I spent some time making leaves, using the technique I learned when making daffodils and irises:

You need to curl the leaves to make them look realistic. I found a foam-lined coaster that served the purpose, and I used my nail file, as suggested in the tutorial. Each flower needed four leaves, so it took some time.

These are the colours I happened to have. Tulips come in every imaginable colour, and some are multicolour or speckled, but I will save that for later.

I got so excited that I decided to make a florist shop. This coincided with an urgent need to glaze my room boxes, and in the process I dismantled my old tea shop to use the box for florist's. Once upon a time you could get wine boxes at wine merchants for a small donation to charity, but not anymore, because, I think, many shops and cafes use them for decoration. I know I can buy a room-box kit, but I am not there yet. I have made several environments in shoe boxes and small cardboard boxes, but wine boxes look so much neater.

I did try to put all flowers I had in a cardboard box. Mainly just to see whether I liked the idea. I dug up Poundland furniture that I once bought in great numbers for upcycling.

 I liked the idea, but I definitely felt I wanted to use a wine box.

I tore down the wallpaper and the floor from the tea shop. This was one of my early room boxes, and I hadn't decorated it very well. And the wallpaper wouldn't have suited a florist shop anyway. I lined it with white lining paper and made a floor with a self-adhesive shelf lining.

I added wainscotting, using my old faithful 1:1 wallpaper. I still need to add moulding.

Meanwhile, I needed to do something with the furniture. This is the recurrent thing with room boxes (or any project that has an environment): you are eager to make whatever you are making - flowers in this case - but you have to prepare the environment first. Luckily, I like upcycling too.

I did a low table and two sideboards. The dresser in the centre moved from the tea shop - it isn't in scale, but I don't think it matters. I distressed it a bit. The fancy table on the left is made from a Chippendale kit. If you have a fancy piece in the foreground it catches the attention, and the rest is less noticed.

I am not sure about delft tiles - they were fine in the tea shop, but perhaps not in a flower shop. But that's easy to replace. Maybe with an old-fashioned flower pattern.

I also wanted a kind of multilevel display arrangement as they have in florist's, and I spent some time trying different options, including steps made from jenga blocks, but they looked too crude. So finally I built one from craft sticks.

 

When it was time to make more flowers it so happened - I swear, I hadn't planned it! - that a friend asked me to take her to a shopping centre, and while she was doing her shopping I ran over to my favourite hobby store. In my previous post I stated confidently that I wasn't buying a paper punch any time soon, but since I was there anyway... and they had a special offer... So it was meant to be.

I also bought two sets of tiny flowers in the wedding aisle. One just went in as it was. The other was a bundle of closed roses, and I first thought I would just put them in a jar, but then I thought that wasn't much of a challenge so instead I made some bouquets, adding flowers I made with the punch and with a set of scrapbooking daisies. (Scrapbooking and weddings have some amazing resources for miniature-making).

I punched various papers I had at home. 

The punched flowers were easy to attach to stems: I did exactly the same as with daffodils and irises: dabbing the tip of the wire in yellow paint, then adding a bead underneath the flower. I used three layers for each flower. They need leaves, but I don't really know what kind of flower they are and what kind of leaves this flower should have.

  


Then I had these prefabricated daisies some of which I left as they were and some painted in various colours.

 It wasn't until I started painting that I noticed they were also different shapes, which added to the variety.

Now, these were tricky to attach to stems because they already had a bead in the middle, too small to make a hole through. I prepared the stems with a bead glued on to one end.

 

I used strong glue and let it dry properly before gluing on the flower.

I made several pots: 

 

The ones on the left could be anemones. The ones on the right look very authentic, but I don't know what they are.  The leaves are made from a Christmas candlestick decoration that I had had for years, wondering when it might come handy. The pots are bottle caps.

The rest of the daisies, with longer stems, I added to the ready-made roses, arranging them in four OOAK bouquets wrapped in paper. I had to look up on the web how to wrap flowers. There are dozens of useful sites. The ferns are tiny sprigs of live conifer.

 

I have lots of materials left, and I took time to arrange them for the future. I know there are commercial organisers (I have some), but I am a recycler, and I have saved this chocolate box precisely for this occasion.

Lots of space for more.

I have got so far this weekend, and I won't have time to do more until next weekend, so here is the result up to date.

Some plants and flowers I had before, both ones I have made and some that came with various job lots. I plan to have a rail with hanging baskets and maybe some wall units, so do come back soon.