St. Johnswort Is Finished

Yesterday (Thursday) I worked, so no minis got done. However, today I decided to finish the flowers and it all got done. Fiddly, but it should look good in my Tudor apothecary garden.

I figured out that if I sort of twirled a corsage pin carefully in the centre of my tiny flowers and star sepals, they would slide up the stems without breaking, providing the wrapping didn't come off the stems first. And provided the glue didn't skin over almost as soon as I put a drop of it on a container to dip my little blossoms in! However, I persevered, and all things considered, I am pleased with the result. The last flowers are being assembled above; the main stem to which they will be attached is sitting in the spool holding the antique silk thread I used for the stamens. Each tiny set of stamens is tipped with orange paint....


The lobster is only sitting there because I had the glue out and it needed gluing.

And here is the finished product; it will eventually need more leaves on the bottoms of the stems, but until they are planted, I will leave them bare because of other plants that may be planted in front of it.
I used a 3/16" (4 mm or less) five-pointed flower punch from Ruth Hanke for the flowers, and the paper is thinner, commercial printer or copier paper. The leaves of the flowers are wider than the leaves from the kit, but the colour is pretty much identical. I used some of my painted printer paper for the leaves.


That took nearly 6 days to finish! Now I am taking a short break, and once I have gotten my energy back, I will try to create belladonna plants for my apothecary garden. There is a tutorial on the French site, Minipat, but it uses dried flowers for the blossoms, while I prefer to use paper, so I'll have to figure out how to create deep, purple-pink, drooping bell-shaped blossoms.


By the way, most of my tweezers and scissors seem to be magnetic; anyone know how to de-magnetise them? It usually isn't a problem, but the stems of these bunched flowers and berries are so tiny, they just stick to the tweezer tips when I try to attach them to the flowers.