If you are a member of the fibre arts community you’d be hard pressed to remain unaware of a decision that has created a strong reaction in the community this week. I’m writing this piece as I know I have a lot of followers who […]
Friends, I have been unhappy. That is putting a rather soft-focus filter on it. I have been depressed for six months. Did I choose unhappiness? No. No, I am going to put my foot down and say that I did not choose to be unhappy. […]
Do you have a favourite flower? I’m not entirely sure that I do, but these last few years I have favoured big, flouncy blooms, and things like peonies and hydrangeas have been high on my list of ones I’d love to have gracing my imaginary country kitchen. But like my large, spacious kitchen, the flowers have failed to materialise. I rarely have fresh flowers, and have never seen either peonies or hydrangeas for sale, so when I made some flowers for a paper Spring Wreath recently, I decided that I was also going to try to make a paper hydrangea.
Making the hydrangea was not for the faint-hearted, which is kind of ironic if you have been following my recent health issues, but though it was time consuming and fiddly, it was very, very rewarding.
I looked up various versions of paper hydrangeas online to get a guide or starting point. Sadly, every tutorial I found was behind a paywall, and though I am not at all averse for paying for patterns and project tutorials at all, they were all parts of services that allowed access to a whole site for a month or year for a price that was too much for me to pay for the sake of something I could do myself, and I was doubtful that I would make use of any of the other projects, so this project is made up of a lot of educated guesswork and a bit of trial and error.
One of the things I most love about hydrangeas is the wash of colour that each globe of flowers takes on. I think I read that it is determined by the PH level of the soil, acting like nature’s own Litmus paper. I love that way that each dome can drift in colour and intensity, and so I wanted a watercolour effect that shifted both in hue, from blue through to purple, but also in depth of colour with some paler blossoms alongside the more intensely coloured ones.
I started by cutting the watercolour sheet into 121 individual little blossom shapes of four petals. I used the Cricut machine because I cannot even imagine cutting those all by hand. Why 121? Because that’s the number that I could fit on my 30 x 30cm sheet of paper. Again, there are cutfiles available for a fee, and I used one that was included with the Cricut Access one month free trial. It worked perfectly, though I scaled up each bloom until it was 2.6cm in width.
The blossoms were then given a pale yellow-green centre and curled on the outside edges around the end of a fine artists paintbrush. I admit that this was a little tedious.
Eventually I had prepared all of my individual little flower heads (none of these are meant as technical terms, so gardeners, please forgive me – I have sadly never had a garden of my own). Arranging them into the familiar pillowed shape of the hydrangea involved a bunch of floral wires taped together – about 25, with the top 10cm of each wire bent out into a dome. I bent the tip of each wire into a little circle and then bent this circle out at 90º to the length of the wire, to resemble something akin to a teeny tiny metal detector.
I loosely arranged the little flowers into five groups of similarly coloured paper pieces and attached six or seven of one colour group to the ends of the floral wires using UHU glue.
I built on this, keeping each of the colour groups of petals roughly together, so that the hydrangea had subtle but defined areas of differing hue. Some of the flowers were joined to wires, most were not. Each flower was joined to the wire structure and/or neighbouring flowers by at least 2 (but up to five) points of contact.
It took a good few hours of work, but finally I got the ‘dome’ of the hydrangea finished.
If you embark upon something like this I would recommend that one of the handiest ideas I had whilst making this was to use sewing/quilting clips to hold each of the blooms as I worked, as the glue set.
I made the leaves from a beautiful heavy piece of textured green cardstock. To give a bit of extra dimension to the leaves I used some ‘distress ink’ that I had from making similar leaves for flowers when I married.
I used the same technique I did back then: lightly dabbing a make-up sponge into the ink pad, blotting this onto a ceramic plate, then moving the ink in small circles from the plate onto the edges of the leaves.
This gave a bit of extra dimension to the leaves and I finished with a gentle link of the ink down the centre crease of the leaves. I think a similar effect could be given with artists pastels or coloured pencils blended inwards from the edge.
I made five large leaves and assembled then joined them to the stem and to a few of the blooms to keep everything sturdy. And then I sat back and admired it.
And I am really so very happy with how it turned out. It’s just the right size, and just the right colour, and it’s just enough.
I love the way that the colours move when you approach it from different angles. From pale lilac, through purple to blue. I love the amount of air it has, making it look light, yet so substantial.
And it is strongly constructed. The day after I completed it I decided that it should be for my Ma, who has cared for me all year whilst I have been ill. As we went to get into the car a strong gust of wind lifted it out of the vase and it blew straight across the car park, but it was undamaged.
This hydrangea was an exercise in persistence, and patience, and in keeping in mind that everything was going to pull together in the end. And it ended up strong, and beautiful. And so I can think of no better reason to have made it than to say thanks to my ma for all the huge sacrifices she has made this year. We aren’t over it all, yet, but it’s been a great deal easier not being left alone to deal with it as a small nuclear family of three.
For the past two seasons I’ve had a wreath on my front door, because I like the little handmade reminder of nature as I cross the threshold to home. So, after the wreaths of paper leaves for autumn, and paper snowflakes for winter, I decided […]
A month or so ago we were discussing Darwin’s favourite programs when we said he’d never really got into a film. I thought, perhaps, that he might like Studio Ghibli’s My Neighbour Totoro. Russell wondered if he’d find it at all interesting, but as Darwin […]
The Boost Your Knitting series is underway, and March’s technique is tuck stitches. At the outset of this project I did not fully understand what a tuck stitch was. The pattern and accompanying tutorials for the Bramen Cowl, by Nancy Marchant, starts with a brief explanation of how a tuck stitch is usually performed:
Tuck stitches can be worked either by knitting into a row below the current row, or by working a series of stitches where you both slip the stitch and add a yarn over, followed by knitting (or purling) the stitch with its yarn over(s)
From The Bramen Cowl, Boost Your Knitting: Another Year of Techniques
This description… I kind of recognised. I’d knit some simple brioche once or twice before, and the steps were similar to those, and indeed, these are some of the applications of tuck stitches: when stacked in columns they can form the basis for Brioche stitches, or Fisherman’s Rib, so I am hopeful that the knitting learned here will help settle me with familiarity the next time I attempt brioche.
When knit, the tucked stitches used in the Bramen Cowl produce a thick, smooshy, bouncy fabric that’s extra warm and snug. The stitch compresses the rows somewhat to make a fabric that works almost in two layers, with the foreground stitches sitting in short checkerboard columns, forward of the background stitches.
Knit in Schoppel Wolle Gradient yarn, a wonderful, slightly felted single ply yarn with a long colour repeat gradient, the foreground and background stitches each shift through the colour transitions independently. The effect can be quite subtle with some of the colourways that move through the shades of a single hue (such as the reds of the Cranberries colourway, or the blues of Stonewashed) or quite striking when the yarn incorporates two or more contrasting colours. My Bramen Cowl is knit using a single ball of the Parrot colourway. The pattern gives great detail on how to split your yarn into two correctly sized balls before knitting, but as I am lucky enough to have a ball winder, I wound my skein into a centre-pull ball and knit from the outside and inside ends simultaneously. I didn’t colour-manage the ball, instead just knitting the yarn as it had been spun, and the result was background of dark emerald through to a yellow-spring green, as the foreground moved from emerald, through white, into red. The whole effect reminded me of a slice of fresh watermelon.
Or does it look like a field of tulips? Because, although both sides of the stitch pattern are different, both are beautiful. Here, on what would have originally been the reverse of the stitch pattern, the background colour has a bit more prominence, allowing the foreground colour to pop it’s little jewels through like the blooms on a flowerbed. It’s so pleasing.
I knit the Bramen cowl as the pattern directed. My only very small changes were in knitting from both ends of the re-wound centre-pull ball of yarn, and (as both yarn ends started with the same colour of emerald green) not doing the two-colour long tailed cast on.
The finished cowl is full of bounce and pillowy smooshiness, whilst still being stable and structured, all thanks to those clever little tuck stitches. The rhythm of the knitting is addictive and comforting, and you can lose yourself in the ‘just one more row’ promise, whilst learning or perfecting the humble tuck trick.
If you are interested in this project, you may wish to read more about the Boost Your Knitting: Another Year Of Techniques series and accompanying knitalongs.
