July 12
Adorn your home with beautiful arrangements of silk flowers in this flower arranging book with a difference. I remember when they first came out in the early 1980s and how artificial they looked compared with the ones you can buy today. The flowers chosen for this book are particularly lifelike, and of course if real flowers are more your thing you can use them for the arrangements just as well. But silk flowers come into their own here, used for a variety of occasions such as weddings, anniversarys, baby showers, Christmas etc or to celebrate the seasons. What you need for proper silk flower arranging surprised me; restore tired or crushed blooms with the steam from a kettle, acrylic water to hold stems upright, and plant stakes for anything floppy. How much better my own efforts might have been with these extras! The book starts with a list of common flower types and what they are best for and then goes on to look at containers. The main body of the book shows a variety of projects and how to do them, in Search Press' trademark photographs and captions style. Arranging flowers is not a skill I profess any prowess at, so looking at these and seeing how the arrangements are built up was quite a revelation. The section is divided into flowers for the home (ie the sort of displays used as everyday ornaments) and flowers for special occasions, many of which would certainly look most impressive and professional. Finally you can discover how to look after the silk flowers, including how to lengthen stems if you have cut them short and want to use them in another project. There are lots of glorious colored photographs in here of the finished items, although some of the smaller staged ones were a little dark. Turn to the back and there is a list of stockists if you live in the UK, rounding off a useful and pretty user-friendly primer on a craft not often covered.
* Myshelf.com *
