Other than the ’sale item, half price’ sign, the dark stoney trough said ‘buy me’.   I hadn’t a clue what for until a recent walk in a park, and there was the answer suddenly at my feet.  The vibrant lights of spring flowers were bursting through the dead leaves of last year’s autumn as winter was finally switched off and that was it.   The moment to capture in miniature.  That’s why I’d bought the trough.

 

The first thing to do was fill the trough with a thick polymer clay layers of yesterday’s failures squashed together with a top dressing of brown clay.  You can relax.  The slimey trails in the photos did not come out of a 1/12th scale slug, just a tube of glue.  The stuff gets everywhere.

 

The main material I used to make this trough was polymer clay (Fimo).   I love using this for flowers for three reasons.  Firstly the infinite variety and intensity of colours you can achieve.  Secondly the ability to rebake and rebake, so you can create multiple layers of petals/leaves without disturbing the shape of what you’ve already done.   Thirdly, I have a big deep drawer full of it and it needs using up.

 

I used only very simple tools to put the whole arrangement together – just tweezers, a needle, a razor blade and my fingers.  I know that very flowers can be crafted using the many wonderful flower cutters available.   However, the sad truth is that I’m no good with cutters!   I don’t know why, but as soon as my fingers spot cutters, they turn into fat sausages incapable of handling or manipulating anything.  This leaves me with the time-consuming method of tweezers, a needle, and obedient fingers.

 

My method when making flowers is always to start from the centres and work outwards, rebaking the different layers if/when necessary.   I haven’t actually ever needed to dissect a flower but I often root through them in nurseries counting petals.  And yes – that’s in public.  (As an aside, primulas have five petals, sometimes six, and they seem to overlap quite randomly.  I thought you’d like to know that.)

 

The crocuses and the primulas had the same ground rice origins at their centres.  Thirty-three gauge paper-covered wires were dipped in white PVA glue, then into ground rice that had been already mixed with pastel chalk (orange for the crocuses, yellow/green for the primulas).   These were left to dry and harden.

 

For the single coloured crocuses, it was a question of rolling a manageable sized ball of the clay, gently drawing off a petal shape from one end then nipping it off with the needle.   This was applied to the pre-hardened centre with a dab of PVA glue, and the exercise repeated and repeated.

 

The primulas were made slightly differently, having bi-coloured petals.   I made a log of the two colours in a rough petal shape, took very thin slices off with a razor and shaped them with the needle and tweezers.  These were applied and overlapped onto the centres.

Although snowdrops in real life have coloured centres, you can’t actually see them unless you turn them upside down, so I skipped that step and started with the petals.  The three inner petals were made using a very basic cane with white and a green “V” shape, from which a cut three slivers.  I then drew out three longer petals from a ball of  white clay and placed these in between the three inner petals.  

 

At this stage the flowers were all baked.   A word here about clay baking temperatures. For delicate flowers, you must make sure they don’t bake at too low a temperature otherwise they will crumble. Depending on which clay you are using and the plasticizers they contain, the necessary range is 110 – 130 degrees C but you will need to experiment with your own oven as they are all slightly different.   For my oven the correct temperature for flowers is just one tiny click below Gas Mark 1.   An accidental tiny click above Gas Mark 1, a long phone call and the flowers are burnt.

 

Once baked, I added additional greenery to the stems of the crocuses and snowdrops while the rest of the leaves were made separately.  If you want to add very fine veins to a polymer clay leaf, or simply give it that extra little crinkle, try pressing the clay against a “skeleton leaf” then removing it before baking. I came across these skeleton leaves (see photo) in the card making/scrap booking section of craft shop and I think they worked particularly well with the primula leaves.

 

When it came to arranging the flowers in the trough, I had no great design in my head.   I just dug holes with the needle and placed them and re-placed them until I was happy with the effect.   I didn’t use glue at this stage, but chose the liquid clay.  This gives a sufficiently globular medium for the flowers to stand up in, but doesn’t set until going back into the oven so I could move everything around until I was happy.   The whole thing went back into the oven to harden the all “earth” and liquid clay, and the scene was now set.

 

Now for the finishing bit.  The fun bit.  Throwing scatter material around the base of the flowers and leaves.   And it’s so easy. It all comes out of bags (apart from the diluted PVA that is spread first.)   First of all the loose earth, which is just very fine brown railway ballast.  Like the glue, these tiny granuals did get everywhere, so they had to removed from petals and leaves with a pin to prevent the appearance of a premature aphid attack. Then the miniature real dried leaves – again railway material.   (You can get mixed leaves, oak leaves and ivy leaves.   For the trough, I stuck to oak leaves).  Then finally other odd bits of greenery which I’ve picked up at various dollshouse/model railway shows and the trough was complete.

 

So there you have it, a moment in spring, my lasting memory of a beautiful place in a park at a particular time in the year that will last for many seasons to come.  It is something to hold on to.