Advanced Gum Paste Flowers – Class #3

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We’ve had a couple classes of making parts of flowers and leaves.  When you’re dealing with ornate flowers, they have to be made in pieces and then fully dried before assembling and detailing them.

Tonight, we pull together almost all of our flowers.  Also, we make some of the other flowers we finished prettier.

Here is lesson plan for this course.  The red, bold text is what we covered in the class:

• Blossoms
• Gerber Daisies
• Sweet Peas
• Ivy Leaves
• Lily Leaves
• Briar Rose
• Stargazer Lily
• Stephanotis
• Assemble Blossoms, Leaves and Bouquets
• Using Flower Spikes

We started the class making the Stephanotis Bud.  At first, I thought it was going to be a base for the Stephanotis flower we were going to be making later in the evening’s class.  I was wrong.  Instead it is an unopened version of the flower to be used as a filler flower in a bouquet.  Like in this picture from Plant-Care.com.

Plant-Care.com

What’s a filler flower?  It complements the bouquet as a whole instead of being the focus, filling in spaces between the flowers that are meant to be the basis of the display.  They don’t take focus away from the focal flowers.  Instead, they complement them.  For example, a bouquet of roses usually has baby’s breath and additional greens to make it fuller.  The baby’s breath and greens would be considered filler flowers.

Anyway, in almost all bouquets, it is rare that you will have all blooming flowers.  It makes sense to have some buds that aren’t open yet in your arrangement.

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Stephanotis Bud

And what lovely buds they are, and yes, I only made one.  I had some gum paste issues and only managed to get one done before we moved on to the next flower.

I should also point out that the calyx and shading was added later in the class after the bud had some time to dry.  Also, I jumped ahead because the shading was supposed to happen in the next class.  I just couldn’t wait!

Moving along, we did the Stephanotis flower.  The pictures in the book make the flower seem like they are much bigger than they are when you’re making them.  These tiny little flowers are rolled out thin, have delicate leaves and start drying almost immediately, so you have to work fast.

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Stephanotis

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Stephanotis

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Stephanotis

I have to admit that I love this flower.  I almost wanted to make a bouquet of these my final project, but chickened-out.

Types-of-Flowers.com

It was finally time to make use of the base we made in the first class and assemble our Sweet Pea flowers.  When I was looking for pictures of the actual flower, I fell in love with it.  I am definitely going to be playing with different colors.  





For now, I made this lovely yellow Sweet Pea.

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Sweet Pea

Full disclosure: I am writing this after the final class.  One of my fellow students made a tiered cake with these flowers winding up the side.  It. Was. Gorgeous.  She’s also still in high school and said she would send me a picture of the finished project.  I’ll update you when I get it.

When then gave some detail to flowers we made over the past two classes.  We shaded our Ivy Leaves and Lily Leaves to give dimension to the veins.

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LilyLeaves

And what a difference it made!  I like the flowers before, but if you look at my previous pictures in the last post, you couldn’t see the elaborate detail that the leaves have.  Now you can see the amount of pattern that the leaves have instead of just the shape.

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Ivy Leaves

Remember my tiny little Blossoms?  What I did do to it was shade it to give it depth… and sparkles!  I had an issue with my color dust not being dark enough to effectively shade the petal ridges.  So I had some pink Pearl Dust from the last class and decided to use it. 

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Blossoms

I loved the effect it gave these delicate flowers.  Before you really couldn’t see the detail, but it is now popping out of the picture.  Well maybe not POPPING out of the picture, but it definitely makes a difference.

Finally, we gave the Briar Rose a little more dimension and visual interest.

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Briar Rose

See how we shaded around the stamen to give the appearance of pollen?  Love it!

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Briar Rose

I can’t believe we only have ONE CLASS LEFT!  I’m excited and disappointed at the same time.  I’m excited because I love the challenge of the final project and we’ll pull all of our flowers together.  I’m disappointed because it is the final class.  I’ve really enjoyed taking this series of classes from Wilton and it forces me to take a break from everyday tasks and do something fun.

What will my final project be?  As I said, I’ve already done it, but you’ll have to wait until the next post to see what it is.  So until then… happy decorating!