primroses

Had loads of trouble with my new computer, so I have had to return it. Have decided to use my Kindle Fire to do my blogging instead.
Busy doing all the Christmas decorating and just thought I'd put a quick post on telling you that I shall be back later to tell you all about my Primroses that I made last year.
I'm back at last, the tree looks gorgeous and I've wrapped all the presents. My reward for all this....A really nasty cold, loads of sneezing and coughing, I am pooped!  But I digress, let me tell you more about the primrose.  If my youngest daughter hand't had a pagan wedding I never would have started making clay flowers. You see, she wanted a special cake with a country theme, toadstool, hedgehogs, wild flowers and birds etc. I had come across a lovely tiny bird ornament, the only trouble being its tail was snapped off. I knew of Fimo air drying clay and thought I'd have a go at making a new tail. Actually I ended up using Das clay (same outcome as Fimo) and when I'd moulded it on and painted it with acrylic paint you couldn't tell there had been a break at all, I was really pleased.
I found it quite rewarding and very different from my usual pastimes of watercolour and acrylic painting and pyrography. I went on you tube to see what other folk were doing with air drying clay. To not ramble I'll tell you that through the searching I came across sugarcraft flowers being made, gosh, how amazing, I also learnt that what you can do with sugarpaste you can do with a host of clays, just what I wanted. I shall tell you about my choice of clays at a later date.
After many attempts at flowers, which I will say were all quite pleasing, I decided to do some "proper" flowers in some sort of arrangement, and so my primroses were made. Primroses are my favourite flower the perfect yellow I think.

I bought a selection of books on sugar flowers (the sort they use to decorate elaborate cakes, like wedding cakes) the method and tools used are exactly the same as you would use for air drying clay. I decided to give the lovely Primrose a go and I'm proud to say the final basket looked quite good. Patience is the order of the day because you have to wait a long time between some of the stages, overnight sometimes.
After the primrose there was a huge gap in time before I did anything else because we moved house. My 81 year old Mother lives with us and she is quite ill so my husband and myself take care of her which does take up a lot of our time, as you can imagine. The moving of us and her was very stressful. The bungalow we've moved into has had to have loads of work doing to it, the majority being up dating and decorating, so between this and caring for Mother there has not been a lot of time for crafting.
As soon as I found some time I practiced making one or two of different flowers to get the feel of it again, then I made the Iceland poppies I talked about earlier. These are my husband's favourite.
Over the past few days I felt like a change from flower making and did a quick pyrography drawing of a Peacock on a piece of Baltic Birch plywood, which I highlighted with the delicate colours of some wonderful water paints called Sparkling H2o' s made by a company called Luminarte. These paints have mica in them which gives the paint a slight glitter when the light hits it. Not a Christmassy type of glitter, more of a sheen.
 Anyway I love them, although they are quite difficult to get hold of. Hobbycraft certainly don't have them, and if they did they would cost the earth!
I'm off now to get Mother's lunch, I shall show you the Peacock in my next post. Coming Mother dearest. No! Got that one wrong, she says she wants coffee first and lunch a bit later. Golly,I love taking care of my dear Mama. See you later.x