And what goes with green?

Red geraniums of course......

I've spent quite a bit of time over Thursday night, part of Friday and tonight, doing some geraniums for the front of Gooseberry Cottage.  I had two long pots - or rather troughs - from a Templewood kit of pots, and these ones I painted the same green as the doors to the cottage and the scullery kitchen.  They are the perfect size to sit one at the front of the main cottage and one at the front of the kitchen.  And I'm thinking that a hanging pot on the front wall might be a nice touch too.

Here they are so far:

Aren't they cheerful? and really appropriate for that 'cottagey' feel too, I think.  I have the new charger for my camera now and I am much more comfortable using it than I am using Peter's camera.  I tried taking a photo of the kitchen with the light on and the front wall in place and it certainly looks homey and welcoming.

A lot of people have indicated that they are intimidated by the thought of doing quarter scale flowers.  I do use kits for all of my flowers, because the punches for the tiny petals are so expensive and the range of punches required for the variety of petals is quite large.  So I thought I'd show you how they are made.  I'll use the geraniums, which are not the simplest of the flowers in the range but they are the ones I'm doing at the moment so it is convenient to use them as the example.

First, here is one of the petals on my finger:

Yes, they are tiny.  In fact the most difficult part is separating the petals - they come pre-coloured and several layers of paper are punched together, so the petals tend to stick together.  It can be fiddly seperating them but rubbing them with the ball of a larger stylus helps or sliding the point of a scalpel between them does the trick.

After they are separated, they are rubbed firmly with a small stylus on a bit of old mouse pad to make them cup-shaped.  When enough of them are done they are glued to the end of a wire which has previously had a tiny bit of glue added to it to form a tiny 'bead' and allowed to dry. You can see the importance of very, very pointy tweezers for doing these!

It takes between 8 and 10 of the petals to cover the 'bead' and once they are all on, it can be moulded into the proper shape with one's fingers if they have become a bit distorted. 

The leaves have a tiny 'stem' on the end, and this is bent over and attached to a wire stem. 

After trimming the wires to a good length - slightly different for a bit of variety - some air drying clay is glued into the troughs.  This is topped by a more glue then bit of 'soil' is sprinkled over that.  The stems are dipped into glue and arranged into this clay, and it is all left to solidify and dry.

And there you have it - quite straightforward really, just requiring a bit of patience and fine pointy tweezers.  And of course some good kits from sdk miniatures or somewhere.