Flowers for a wedding

 Here are the finished earrings. This time I made the flowers bigger than my first test batch. This also made it a lot easier to create them. My first batch consisted really on tiny wee flowers! Have a look here :)

I baked the flowers, carved the back so I could fit in the silver earrings and then attached it all with more polymer clay. This time I used cernit white porcellain because it is slightly transparent and it is not sticky at all. Normally this makes it a more difficult clay to work with but works wonder to create this absolutely thin flower petals. 

You can see the metal through the clay. I made a pair of earrings and a single flower to go as pendant for a necklace. My friend who commissioned these pieces for the weeding of a friend of her (still following me? ^^) would also add a silver bail to it. I just baked a silver jump ring in the back and balanced it out so the flower would hang very nicely.

The balance was also my biggest issue. I could have used earring blanks for this but always the roses would rather face downward (even being very light) and I don't like this look. I know that a lot of ready-made earrings people buy have this fault. I am always wondering if nobody else is seeing this? 

And after all the pictures without a pop of colour, here a picture how bright the flowers are! :)

They are a little bit uneven, you have the pattern of my thumb prints on top and there are not identical and all of this together creates something magical. The image of a delicate flower. Simple but surprisingly difficult at the same time.

Tiny white flowers

These are my training pieces for a special earring commission. A friend was helping a friend of her (I never meet her) with her wedding. The bride had some ideas about her jewelery in mind so I started to play around. Her inspiration were white flower earrings (you know the kind of flower, made with resin and a mold, nice but you can see at the first glance what it is and how it was made). 

My favorite polymer clay to work with is fimo classic. But in this case I switched to cernit porcellain white. It is a beautiful white with a subtle translucent. You can't see it without comparison to opaque white but it creates a more delicate feeling. Also the cernit is not as sticky as fimo classic (which itself is already not as sticky as a lot of other brands) therefor I was able to freeform the single petals between my fingertips. I learned to love finger prints to create more structure (thanks to all the books of Christien Friesen :)) and for these flowers it also makes all the difference.

I also made them with fimo effect translucent. Also beautiful but they have a complete different feeling. Not as fitting as the porcellain white from cernit.

All together, yes, I played around to get a better feeling how to make them.

Here is my finger next to them: Just so you get the idea how tiny they are! 

This was the first method I tried. Nice and I see a lot of uses for them but not... not perfect. This is why I started then really to make every single petal one after another.

The final pieces are also made, she wanted the flowers to be bigger! ^^ The weeding is also over so therefore I can show you know all these flowers. I still have to edit the other pictures with the finished pieces...

...and I feel so, so, so honored that someone (who doesn't even know me) would wear earrings made by me to her wedding!

PS: A little trick if you need to work with your finger tips and the clay sticks to your skin: Use baby (talcum) powder! It works wonder. Just use it at the end because if you already have a non-sticky polymer clay and mix it with these powder, it just crumbles. But as soon as you have your little pieces to flatten and to form between the finger tips, it works so great.