Two More Desert Plants

 

At the right back, we have a Black-Eyed Susan  plant, complete with seed heads and opening buds; this one took 3 days to glue the wires in shape; if I ever do it again, I'll use fuse wire and treat it like a very miniature tree! At its foot is a Queen Anne's Lace plant; it is a bit hard to see, as it is white and like a lot of desert plants, has gray-ish foliage. It might be more apparent if you enlarge the photo.

For the next couple of days, I'm pulling out a crochet piece for a friend who wants to turn it into a scarf; as there is alpaca in the yarn, it tends to get itself stuck, requiring the use of a fine pair of scissors to cut the one tiny offending fibre. One ball down, two or three more to go. I also did a little embroidery on a table centre I started about 2 years ago, which I want to finish in time for Easter. Both those tasks are a little kinder on my newly operated eye than minis....

More South-Western Miniature Botany

 It took quite a few days, but I managed to make a passing lantana plant; it began with squashing styrofoam balls to make my own floral foam, progressed to paint-mixing that foam, then when it was dry, carefully chopping it into tiny, tiny bits with a tissue blade. I am happy with the results, which involved a fair bit of additional painting.

The other time-consuming item is a yucca tree; my deserted desert garden needed some height, as most of the plants made for it so far are quite low. The yucca will fill that need quite nicely. The tutorial is available on-line, if you google "miniature yucca trees", and is in YouTube format.

The yucca tree is about 10 cm tall, made of paper on a wire armature, with rings of  floral wire (which I had in brown) for the knotholes. I am very pleased with this little tree. The last cluster of leaves still needs to be bent into shape, as you can see; I just finished dry-brushing in the join of the leaf cluster to the stem.

 The instructor sells kits to make these flowers, but I kind of made up my own kit in order to get closer to finishing this little garden.

She uses a circular array of yucca leaves, but I used strips of white copy paper left over from some other project. Five colours of felt-tip pen were used, two of the pens were alcohol-based artists inks, but the other three were inexpensive Crayola water-based markers. You can see the results above. This technique of blending markers is kind of intriguing, and I may explore it further.

I am coming up in a few days to my second cataract surgery, so the next week may be rather quiet here on the blog. However, I will be back, as next up I have to design the actual little garden base; there are a number of possibilities for the materials, likely a combination of card, builder's foam and paint will be the best way to go. There will be old fence posts, and perhaps miniature barbed wire, but I need both

eyes working to be able to do that!

Winter Makes Me Want to Make Flowers

It seems that when it is cold and snowy outside, I decide I have to make flowers. The YouTube videos by Cathy Brickner are calling out to me, so today I made some more of them.

I had made the Indian Paintbush yesterday, and begun the pieces for the Indian Blanket Flower and the Texas Bluebonnets. Today I finished them, and I am quite pleased with them. It seems to me that the technique Cathy B. uses to make her bluebonnets can also be used very effectively for hyacinths, so I plan to try those once I finish the desert flowers. As you can see, the Rain Lilies made previously have now got their leaves, using the same painted paper I also use for Dusty Miller plants.

The Blanket Flower is a bit pale for my taste; we have these growing in our Eastern Woodlands garden under the name Gaillardia, and the yellow is rather brigher, I think. In the background are the Wine Cup Poppy Mallows (I probably remembered that wrong!), waiting for their centres; I'm trying out another idea as I didn't have all that much luck painting fake snow....

A closer look at the Indian Paintbrush, Rain Lilies and Pink Evening Primrose; all of these have been made with stuff I had on hand, but I do need to acquire a large snowflake and a large daisy punch, as they are frequently used to create the foliage.

I'm (mostly) having fun....

 

We Got Cut Off for a Few Days

 We've had no contact with the outside world for a couple of days, as a cable was crushed somewhere and interrupted the telephone, internet and television connections to our house. Combined with cold winter weather and now, strong winds, I wish once again that people could just hibernate like the animals do! The temperature is going to -30C tonight.

I did some work, however, slowly and carefully as my new eye gets used to its lens; I had my first cataract surgery nearly two weeks ago, and am now driving without glasses for the first time in well over half a century....

Two glue pots, a right angle, and two glue brushes awaiting their bristles are ready for the bookbinder's shop. The front facade has been cut, as well as the two side walls, but I have to be patient (sigh!) for the other walls needed. As I do not have a miniature lathe, I cheated and cut apart a wooded goblet for the pot holding the brush, with a base of a small wood circle added. The other glue pot had much of its tapered base cut away, and because it was solid wood it didn't affect the pot shape. That uses up some of my far too large stash.... The right angle is painted cardboard.

Book production has also gone ahead. Some of the spines didn't bend nicely and tore a bit, but that's fine as those will become the books waiting to be re-bound! The nicer books will be the finished product for the shop.

And I recently stumbled over a series of YouTube videos by Cathy Brickner, in which she makes more than a dozen southern prairie wild flowers. Today I found a stash of a material very like Flower Soft at a local second-hand store, and I can use that to make some of the other flowers in her series. The videos are short, which means you have to pause while you work on the flowers, but that gets me up out of my chair and makes me walk over to the computer on a regular basis. (Well, I have to look for the silver lining, don't I?) The white flowers are rain lilies, awaiting their grey-green leaves, while the pink ones are evening primroses. The stems have their leaves, but I won't plant them until I've made a whole garden of near-desert flower varieties, as they are all different heights..

I'm thinking of a small flower-bed that has been allowed to go wild, with perhaps a cactus or two in it now, and a tumble-down fence - which will likely mean back to barbed wire manufacture - and if I can find one, a scale Texas longhorn skull. We'll see! And yes, we do have cactus in Canada; in Alberta you will find prickly pear growing quite happily!