Among the many diverse plants, flowers take pride of place. They are the most modest and at the same time beautiful decoration of our housing. Unfortunately, fresh flowers do not please the eye for long, but people have learned to work miracles. Imitating nature itself, they create beauty with their own hands. Having mastered various methods of manufacturing plants, you can easily transfer a hobby to the category of a source of good additional income.
Passion or work?
Now a very fashionable trend is the hand-made, that is, the manufacture of various things with their own hands. Flowers are also on this list. Many are engaged in such a hobby in their spare time from their main job, and some made it a good business.
To master this type of work, you do not need to purchase special expensive equipment for the production of artificial flowers, there will be a fairly small number of tools that many have at home.
Of course, if you have enough money, you can purchase a plant for molding the stem and leaves, a machine for cutting petals and a forming machine. You must admit that for most beginning entrepreneurs a production line is not available at the initial stage of business development because of its high cost.
Tools for work
For high-quality production of artificial flowers to become real, special tools are needed:
- Buns are special metal balls on the stem, they are used to give the petals a natural shape.
- Rings made of wire. With their help, petals curl.
- Knife with a blunt curved blade. Serves for processing leaves and flowers.
- Knife with two blades. Used in the formation of petals and sepals.
- Metal piece with holes ("ironing"). To create tubes in the manufacture of primroses and other similar parts of flowers.
- Tweezers. It is used for corrugating petals and assembling small flowers.
- Scissors for working with fabric and more.
- Wire cutting pliers.
- An awl for piercing the desired holes.
- Die cuts for getting corollas of small flowers.
- Pillows made of rubber or sand. Needed when working with bullets.
Such equipment for the production of artificial flowers will greatly facilitate your work and allow you to experiment, creating real masterpieces.
Additional work material
In addition to tools for creating flowers with your own hands, you need to use the following:
- The cloth. Her choice depends on the flower that you decide to make. In addition, it is necessary to have dyes, glue and decor.
- To dye cotton and woolen fabrics, you can use aniline dyes, for other materials - food dyes, mascara or photo colors.
- Homemade glue or PVA. The easiest to make is flour glue. A few tablespoons of sifted flour are poured with cold water and mixed well. The homogeneous mixture is heated until glued.
- Wire. You can choose different options. It is better not to use steel wire: it immobilizes the flower, which deprives it of naturalness.
- Decorative paper. It is used for wrapping wire.
- Vata. It is necessary for the manufacture of cores of some colors.
- Threads. They are used to make stamens.
This is just a small list of the basic materials that you will use when creating products.
Basic operations
Depending on the chosen technique, the manufacturing scheme may be different, but in general it can be described as follows:
- Making stems, buds and stamens. Paper is spirally wound onto a wire of the desired length and diameter. If seals are needed, pre-apply a thin layer of cotton wool moistened with paste, and paper already on top of it.
- The fabric used to make the flowers is pre-starch. Recipe: for 2 cups of water, which is brought to a boil in advance, take a tablespoon of starch. It must be added gradually to get a homogeneous consistency. When the starch cools a little, the fabric is lowered into it for a while, which is then squeezed and dried.
- Before making a flower, make patterns of its parts on cardboard. Finished blanks are applied to the fabric along an oblique thread, gently outlined and cut out. Now (optional), you can begin to paint the heads of artificial flowers in the desired colors.
- Stamens give a complete resemblance to the original, so they should be as close as possible to live ones. The easiest way is to starch the threads and allow them to dry when stretched. From flowers that have larger stamens, they take the fabric, using the “ironing” make thin tubes.
After you purchase the above equipment for the production of artificial flowers, you can start work using old clothes or the remains of different materials. When the process is established, material reward for work will be added to moral pleasure.
