If You Go Down to the Woods Today.......

I will still be planting.......
I began yesterday by picking a selection of flower stems. I use a dry oasis from Hobbycraft to hold flower stems as I work. A large block is £1 and I cut it in half, they do shed oasis dust but hold the stems in place very nicely.

 Having decided what flowers I am going to group together in this portion I go back to each kit packet and work on the leaves. This usually includes a but of extra colouring and cupping or curling. I had expected that this stage would be completed in no time at all but as usual I completely underestimated how long it would take. The most important thing is to make sure the plants had different heights and depth of foliage.

 Getting height from the flowers led me to make my own foxglove/gladioli thingies which have actually turned out much better than I expected but were incredibly time consuming.
I started with what were supposed to represent unopened flowers at the top and then added rows of punched flowers glued into the same cupped circles and then finished with cupped geranium leaves that I had previously punched. I have used the same process for all the tall flowers.
They make not be real plants but this is Wonderland so I think I can get away with a bit of artistic licence!!

Many of the kits I use start with the creation of a 'bud' at the top of the flower stem as can be seen here with the pink carnations. I think this is a way of hiding the wire stem and it prevents the additional petals from sliding off. The trouble is that you seem to end up with a big clump at the top with some of the plants and no matter how I tweak and crimp I can't seem to bring the other petals up to meet it. 

I also noticed that even using this technique I never seemed to be able to completely hide the tip of the wire so I now dip all the wire tips in a matching paint colour which avoids this problem.

I lost the kit leaves for the carnations so I added some leaves from my tree stash. These are obviously not accurate but they add a bit more greenery than the proper leaves. 

I made a little blossom bush to hide the LED strip light in the corner next the The Caterpillar using the tiny quarter scale flowers from Mary Kinolch and it seems to have done the job.

 Once I had added all the leaves I added a layer of air drying clay and began placing out the flower stems checking heights and depth. When I was happy with my choices I removed all the flowers and added in the tea leaf/PVA mix. Once this 'soil' was in place I replanted all the flowers including a small patch of tiny pink begonias around the tree trunk.

 On finishing the planting I realised I did not have any teeny tiny ground cover plants to fill in the front gaps beneath the medium sized plants. To avoid the super tidy flower bed look I need to make sure that the edges are broken up by spreading plants and these need to be tiny like the begonias.

 This led to a bit of a mad rush using Mary's laser sheets yet again. These sheets are such good value providing many pre-cut flower shapes and I quickly prepared the wire, added the flower heads from the quarter scale sheets and finished off with some leaves. I had to hurry because the 'soil' mix hardens off pretty quickly and I didn't want it to set and not be able to sink the wires.
In this section I have used: Pink Begonias by Bonnie Lavish, then from the back, my own yellow tall flowers, orange lilies, white roses, blue hydrangeas, pink fuchsias and pink carnations all by Bonnie Lavish. The 'lavender' plants have been made from FlowerSoft and punched leaves.

Another section down and my flower stash is still looking quite healthy but next time I will make sure I have enough teeny plants ready for ground cover!