Build A Flower Mini Tutorial

Yesterday Joan's Gardens introduced the new Cheery Lynn "Build A Flower #1" dies along with the other dies in the May Release.  Today I want to give you a few ideas on ways to help create very realistic flowers. Thursday Joan's Gardens is hosting a Blog Hop featuring the Build A Flower dies.  Be sure to join us for a lot of inspiration from our Guest Designers.  I will be posting a complete tutorial on how to create an entire flower.

I have included a picture of these dies again today so you can see the pieces I used for this tutorial.  First I would like to tell you how I created the stamen.  On the right side is a set of  stamens used for most flowers, but to show you the versatility in these dies, I wanted to show you a stamen that I created by die cutting 8 of the smaller "base", which is under the leaf in the center die. I used dark brown and black cardstock.  Push each "base" down in the black shaping mat to "cup" them.  The colors were alternated for assembly.  Three of them were tightly shaped by adding glue over the entire topside of each, stacked, and pressed in until they stuck together in a cone shape.  The other pieces were just glued in the center and stacked, alternating the points, then the "cone" was glued in the center.   Because this "base" has little ridges along the sides of each point, it resembles the center of a sunflower.

 Next I would like to show you how I gave the die cut "leaf" some character.  First you should use the large white tool from the Flower Tool Kit to condition and shape each leaf. Then  I used the self-closing tweezers, also from the Flower Tool Kit, and created creases along each side.  You just place the tip of the tweezers up to the center line of the leaf and fold the leaf around the tweezers. 

Place the tweezers at an angle rather than straight across so it resembles the veins in a real leaf.  Put our fingers under the leaf and fold up around the tweezers.  Do this on both sides of the leaf.

In this picture you can see the big difference between the leaf on the left side and the leaves that I conditioned and creased with the tweezers. You can learn more about shaping flowers and leaves in Susan Tierney-Cockburn's book called Paper Bouquet available from Joan's Gardens.

I hope this tutorial helps gives you some new ideas and is helpful when you create your flowers.  I love to read your comments to hear your feedback.

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