Christine de Beer - effortless floral craftsman
It's High Time for Tea: from craft to art, taking a delicious floral journey with weaving techniques
- 14 January 2013
- click to send Christine a smile
This was my first two designs for my Floral Craft and Art Demonstration at The Capilano Flower Arranging Club meeting
I demonstrated three floral craft cake designs and three matching floral art designs using the same design techniques and I incorporated my three techniques, where possible, in the other designs just to show how versatile it is.
To weave is to interlace bands or strands or strips of material at right angles to build up a patterned mat, surface or sculptural form.
My Floral Craft design: Weaving ice cream cones
For my neat Kyogi paper ice-cream cone designs I demonstrated how to do a balanced plain weave, turned diagonal and then shaped in a cone.
A plain weave looks like a checker-board and is often described as a "one-up-one-down weave" or "over and under" pattern.
For the ice cream part of the design I glued a few strands of ripped dried cymbidium orchid leaves and wove it in and out and around the tiny test tubes and orchids to secure it in place.
By combining a neat plain weave with a messy, less dense weave you can create a design that changes from arranged to disordered without being overly obvious
Floral Craft ice cream cones
My Floral Art Design: Weaving a Midelino cane coil globe cup
I then showed how to use the weaving technique to make a less dense sculptural form by weaving random bands of Midelino cane coils into a globe cup
Weaving the coils creates added structural stability.
And adds strength to a shape that would otherwise have been flimsy
Randomly follow the over and under pattern
And then weave in the fresh plant material
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Tutorials
Weave a few cones and add orchids to make the floral ice cream cones
Press a wooden skewer into the Styrofoam to help the cones stand upright when displayed
Make test tubes look a bit less obvious and more natural by covering them with moss.
Cut the Phalaenopsis orchid with a bit of green stem attached. This will make them last longer.
For this tutorial I focus on a simple weave pattern that does not require you to soften or prepare the leaves to be more durable or flexible. This is the starting point in...
Related Designs
This is an overview of the Floral Art and Craft Demonstration at The Capilano Flower Arranging Club. I demonstrated three floral craft cake designs and three matching floral art...
This was the second design I did in my "All things Autumn (by which I mean all things chocolate)" floral art demonstration
