One wedding, three creations

Please be kindly informed that we have moved! To read new blog posts, purchase our floral pieces and learn more about how to make flowers you are welcome to visit out new website here

Last week we went to a wedding, my husband's niece was getting married.
To prove the well-known proverb "The shoemaker's son always goes barefoot" wrong, I decided to create a cocktail hat for myself (for once! :-D) to wear at the wedding. It gave me a chance to try my new hat block, a mini beret. I covered the base with a beautiful quilted dupioni silk and decorated with a spray of rumbling roses in purple. 

Floral cocktail hat

To read more please click here

About fabric dyes I use to colour my flowers

Please be kindly informed that we have moved! To read new blog posts, purchase our floral pieces and learn more about how to make flowers you are welcome to visit out new website here

Often I am asked what sort of dyes I use to colour fabrics for my pieces. And it is a very relevant question as not any fabric dyes could be used for our purposes. To start with I can say that acrylic fabric dyes are not suitable for a number of reasons. First, they are quite thick, they coat the fabric rather than just penetrate it thus changing the texture of it and they also stick to the millinery tools when we shape petals or leaves.
The right dyes to use when making silk flowers are so called aniline dyes, synthetic dyes that come in either liquid or powder form.
I started with these Russian made aniline dyes, which come in 11 rather strange completely artificial colours. They need careful mixing before one can come up with a suitable delicate colour to use on flowers.

To read more please click here