100 days: Making Miniature Flors

After I added stems and calyxes to my coffee filter paper roses for the Tea Cup Roses prop in the film (stuck into the face of foam block upper right, of photo below). I kept the floral train rolling by creating Rana's floral arrangement prop seen here.



Making Miniature Flors, originally uploaded by Nobledesign.

I used powdered desiccant to dry out every miniature scale leaf and flower I came across for months. At the end of the day, they never turned out fresh-looking enough to use for this. I opted for hand-painting small silk flowers instead.

Each bloom was painted for the cottage palette, glued onto wire stems, calyx and leaves, painted green. The stems, and things like the yellow center stamens (upper left) were bulked up by tinting Aleene's Porcelain-Ize-It silk flower dipping liquid (part of my essential tools. Couldn't locate any link online (?) the small bit in this last bottle may be it on earth?; closest item here).

(center right) I made an orchid-style flower out of real dried petals, cut down and glued around a smaller dried flower base.

I'm thrilled with how I made the vase. I used the crystal drawer pull that was a candidate for Rana's front door knob, hack sawed off its metal bolt on the reverse, before placing it face down. Then I hacked through a clear plastic over-sized Christmas tree light candy box (bought last year to possibly use as the glass chimney on the oil lantern prop.) slicing off the top and the bottom making it a bowled tube. I filled an inch at the bottom of the shape with clear gel glue and flakes of dried flowers to look like vase detritus and held the knob in place with Funtac (as a glue dam) After a couple days, the glue dried, sealing the bowl, and the knob was firmly stuck onto the bottom of it.

I scratched the inside a bit with sandpaper to add age and texture so it wouldn't look like plastic at first glance. When the bottom of the vase is filled with a lump of the clear museum gel that Mike gifted me with thoughtfully, the stems can be secured in it and it should look just like water!

(PS: I used my Flickr account to post some of the blog photos this week because I was so behind in posts. But I'll much prefer using Blogger posting tool alone in the future.)