This is a guest post by Anna of Gentle Decisions. You can see all Anna's guest posts here.
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Hello all! Today I'll tell you about my work on one of the latest orders. I made two wedding combs. It was a difficult, responsible and interesting order. It was a great experience worth sharing!
I usually start with choosing my materials. There are many kinds of polymer clay, each of them is better than others depending on a purpose of the accessories that are ordered. For example, if we are talking of a comb for a bride that she is going to wear all her wedding day long, then the comb needs to be very light in weight.
I also need to know all the kinds of flowers and their colors and hues before I start. I would need to dye some flowers after I finish making them.
To avoid confusion I wrote a list of the flowers that I needed to make for both ordered combs. I needed to make an orchid, the daffodils and the hydrangeas for the first one and an orchid, the rose buds, the dogwood flowers, the daffodils and a few small chrysanthemums for the second comb. I took out the combs that were finished already, so it would be easier for me to copy the flowers attached to them.
All flowers are set on a piece of wire. Each flower requires different thickness of wire depending on its size. Each pistil and stamen needs to be set on a piece of wire too.
The orchids were going to be the center pieces of each comb. I rolled the clay by hand to make all the orchid petals. I chose not to use the cutters for that job. Then I textured the petals and set each of them on a piece of wire.
The color of the orchids needed to be off-white. I dyed each petal in a hue that my customer requested.
I took a few pictures to show my work in progress:
Everything is sorted out here, so I can start putting flowers into the "bouquets":
I sketched a few designs of the "bouquets". My customer decided to add a few more smaller flowers around the orchids. I took the "bouquets" apart to add new flowers, then put the "bouquets" together again.
All was left after that was attaching the metal combs to the "bouquets". They turned out very light weight, so the bride would feel comfortable without even feeling them in her hair on her wedding day.
The flower compositions were considerably longer than the combs. It just meant that they would need to be secured with a couple of hair pins.
I hope you enjoyed my story!
Here are a few links where you can find more of my work:
VK account (Russian)