I have known for a long time that Barbara Gray's favourite flowers are freesias, and they are a favourite of mine too. I love their perfume. In November 2017, at the NEC I showed Barbara pictures of wedding flowers and decorations that my daughter, Rebecca, had created out of paper for her friend's wedding. I had no idea before that just what this bit of innocent "showing off" would lead to, which was an invitation for Rebecca to create the wedding flowers for Barbara and Dave's forthcoming wedding in the following June.
If you watch Barbara on TV, you will almost certainly have seen pictures of her bouquet. You may not have realised that it contained beautiful hand made paper freesias. I am not going to show those on here as that is for Rebecca to show her secrets. However, her work did prompt me to do something with this month's Stamp of the Month, the freesia, but in its Groovi form.
So, my choice was to create pillow boxes from parchment. On one side I traced the Groovi freesias, putting one single flower on the flap. I found a die to cut the shapes, and was able to cut three at a time, which helped a lot. I used just three Faber Castell watercolour pencils to colour and shade the flowers and leaves, choosing a colour for the flowers to tone in with the wedding flowers. Those three pencils are now very short as I needed very sharp points to colour within the design. There was also a little embossing to add highlights, mostly done with the smallest shader.
The other side changed part way through. I wanted to use Barbara's favourite verse, the Serenity Prayer. I was sure it had been a stamp, but did not possess it and it was not in the current catalogue, so resigned myself to the more lengthy job of using the Groovi, until I mentioned it to Paul. He managed to find me the stamp, which I then used very gratefully to stamp with Versamark and a soft lilac embossing powder.
The final touch was to use Linda Williams' bumble bee Groovi plate to add on the flap. I have to admit that colouring in over eighty bumble bees, and then perforating with the two needle fine Pergamano tool and snipping them out was an interesting exercise, but they are rather cute. They were also essential for this purpose as the boxes contained wild flower seeds, intended to attract bees and butterflies.
I had the very stressful job of taking all of these and the much more important job of carrying the official flowers all the way from Worcestershire to Kent safely. I never knew there were so many nasty bumps in the road and I cringed at every one. However, they all arrived safely.
If you watch Barbara on TV, you will almost certainly have seen pictures of her bouquet. You may not have realised that it contained beautiful hand made paper freesias. I am not going to show those on here as that is for Rebecca to show her secrets. However, her work did prompt me to do something with this month's Stamp of the Month, the freesia, but in its Groovi form.
So, my choice was to create pillow boxes from parchment. On one side I traced the Groovi freesias, putting one single flower on the flap. I found a die to cut the shapes, and was able to cut three at a time, which helped a lot. I used just three Faber Castell watercolour pencils to colour and shade the flowers and leaves, choosing a colour for the flowers to tone in with the wedding flowers. Those three pencils are now very short as I needed very sharp points to colour within the design. There was also a little embossing to add highlights, mostly done with the smallest shader.
The other side changed part way through. I wanted to use Barbara's favourite verse, the Serenity Prayer. I was sure it had been a stamp, but did not possess it and it was not in the current catalogue, so resigned myself to the more lengthy job of using the Groovi, until I mentioned it to Paul. He managed to find me the stamp, which I then used very gratefully to stamp with Versamark and a soft lilac embossing powder.
The final touch was to use Linda Williams' bumble bee Groovi plate to add on the flap. I have to admit that colouring in over eighty bumble bees, and then perforating with the two needle fine Pergamano tool and snipping them out was an interesting exercise, but they are rather cute. They were also essential for this purpose as the boxes contained wild flower seeds, intended to attract bees and butterflies.
I had the very stressful job of taking all of these and the much more important job of carrying the official flowers all the way from Worcestershire to Kent safely. I never knew there were so many nasty bumps in the road and I cringed at every one. However, they all arrived safely.
Rebecca is now busy on another set of wedding flowers with another wedding to do after that.
3 comments:
They were all beautiful Maggie. Rebecca certainly made a wonderful job of the flowers and your pillow boxes were very delicate. x
The flowers were stunning and the pillow boxes so pretty!!
Hope you're having a good day.
Hugs xx
A fantastic job by you both ! Freesias and alstroemerias are my favourite too for cut flowers and fuschias in the garden! X
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