Transcripts
1. Introduction: Hi, welcome to my Skillshare class. I'm so glad you can join me. In this class, we're going to look at how to make five essential sugar flowers that are perfect for filling out those overall floral arrangement. Now, these are the smaller flowers that we will add to those tiny gaps that you will always find when you place in larger flowers together in a cluster. That may be sugar pennies, roses, magnetically. Anything that's quite a large player. You'll always have a small gap, where it's really helpful to add kind of little berries or hydrangeas or all flowers. So in this class I'm going to take you through five really beautiful sugar flowers, that are quite simple to make really fantastic to have as a skill. Because you can actually put these together very quickly, keep them on hand, and then when you are completing your final arrangements, you can just pop things into these little gaps and they would just really make the whole arrangement pop. So let's take a look here at what I have in my hand. We will be making hydrangeas, orange blossoms, wool flowers, little jasmine buds and lilacs. I will take you through how to not only make these flowers or one of them, but also how to add color really effectively to make them pop. Even heading there, few little secrets on how I add colors that you wouldn't usually think of, to really highlight all that reading beautiful work that you've done. Now this class is really fantastic if you do have some experience in sugar flour crop. But please feel free to watch through the lessons either way, because you may find that you're quite unnatural at this and we will pick it up really quickly. If you are less confident, and need to start from the very basic, then do take a look at my other Skillshare class, Building confidence to sugar flour craft. At the end of this class, I'm going to give you a final project. I want you to complete and this will be found in class that you have blocked.
2. Supplies: For this project, you will need a number of tools. You'll need a cane tool and also bulbous cane tool which is a little larger than this one here. You need a rolling pin and bottle, a pencil and a flu tin or veiner tool and this has this flat but sharp point which helps you make all the lines in the petals. You also need some sewing scissors, edible glue, which I'll leave a description into how you make this in the class description box. Then this cutters. So we have a hydrangea cutter set here which I buy from geo sugar craft. But there's many places that you can buy these cutters. You have the full petals to make your shape and stainless steel cutter's, really fantastic to have in your toolkit. Then also a Stephanotis cutter. So you have the five long petals here and we are using the medium size from our set. We've also got a number of paint brushes, Florist tape, some pliers just to make the hooks in our wires. Then also a number of petal dust colors so i have a plum color here, make sure they are edible dust, rose color and violet, and then we use some greens as well. Now for this project I'm going to suggests using a 24 gauge florist wire wrapped in green cotton or green tape. You can use a 26 gauge. So this will be a little bit thinner than the 24. But I think the 24 is a really good size to start with, and you can make your flowers quite easily on this size. You'll also need a really good quality, gum paste or Sugar Florist Paste. I talk about this a lot more in my building confidence in sugar, flour artistry class. Also a Mexican foam pad, what you'll notice with this is that they have three little holes in the mat and you'll see how you use this later on in the class. Also a polystyrene cake dummy is really useful for drying and your flowers along with a drying stand.
3. Making the Hydrangea: Let's look at hydrangeas. These can really be very individual from one flower to the next, just dependent on how much you ruffle those petals when you go to set them. We want a good sized piece of gum paste that has been dyed in pale green. We're just going to kneed this and then roll this in our hands to get rid of any creases. Now taking this board, we have three little defects here, and we'll use the middle defect which is medium sized. The idea is when we press this piece of gum paste into the board, we will create a little hat at the end of our gum paste. We're going to roll this out evenly, pushing all the gum paste away and pushing that little excess piece into the board, as you'll see you when I reveal the bottom. It's very tempting to go to thin with this gum paste, but please don't. Keep it fairly thick because I'll make it a lot easier to work with. As you can see, that some little hat in the center. Taking our full piece, hydrangea cutter, let's place this over our piece of gum paste with a hat in the center. We're just going to gently cut out that gum paste, taking off any excess. Now we can put the excess in an airtight bag. I get these from right here and it just means that your gum paste will not dry out, and then we can use this later to make more hydrangeas. We'll just pop this out with the pull tool. The idea of this little piece of gum paste is that it's going to help us secure it to the wire. On a soft mat, let's get out top point tool. We will be using the top point tool and a phenol tool. Taking the top point tool, we're going to gently ruffle and soften those edges. With the top point tool, half on the mat and half on the edge of the petal. We just going to go around and just get a nice little curl and ruffle into these petals and we'll drag it through the center as well just to lengthen those petals out. Now taking our phenol tool we're going to just do a nice little drag through from the center to the outside, making those lovely little lines that we find in hydrangeas. The more confident you become with this, the more pressure you may add. But definitely just go easy plus fast gentle pressure so that we don't tear the flower. Now taking our hooked wire, we're going to put this into edible glue and then drag this through the front and through the back, through that lovely little piece of excess paste that we've made, the little hat and we're going to secure the rest of that excess gum paste at the back down onto the wire so that it doesn't move. Then we have a lovely open hydrangea. We will just put this into a little dry and stand we will color these petals, so it's got a really organic fill and just leave that to dry. If you squeeze those petals closer together onto the wire, you'll get a completely different effect. Then you can set them up to dry in a different form, as you can see here. This hydrangea is a little closer together and not so open, exposing that tiny piece of wire at the top. This adds such a lot of interests to your overall arrangement. Play around with this and have fun.
4. Making the Wallflowers: Is now again me to make these really colorful flowers. Taking your pink gum paste, we'll roll this into a bowl and then we will start to take for that and so that we have a nice fat tear drop shape. There's rolling end of that gum paste down. You have a little shape like this and then taking out cone tool, we're going to make a little divot in the top of this teardrop, and then just roll in that gum paste up onto the tool we get this nice hole. Will take us as is, and we'll make five little cuts into the top of this, and you'll see that this is so similar to flowers that I've made in my previous Skillshare classes. We've got our five cuts and we're going to just soften those sharp corners that have developed using our thumb and forefinger. That's just soften those out. Don't worry if your petals aren't equal in size because this can just really after the final look of the flower. Let's take a thumb and forefinger again and just press down on those petals, making them nice and flat and easier to work with. Here we go, and then on the self-map, we'll flip this upside down and we want to start working very quickly with the bull tool. Press in or roll in the petals inwards and outwards. Curl in those back and forth up and towards the top, so that the petals do not dry out too quickly. Let's curl up those edges with the bull half on the mat and half on the gum paste. But we're just going to have to work quite quickly with this. Get in and avail the tool and do the same as we did with the hide ranges just drag that ventral from the bottom to the top of each petal to make lovely little lines that will look beautiful when it comes to dusting, these at the end. We'll make these in orange and pink that in this example I'll just show you the pink version of this flower. What's wonderful about these is that you can then start to pinch those edges and just curl them out in this really lovely organic shape, and I just absolutely love these flowers. I will take out wire. Our first wire we'll put a little hook in the top and then we'll deep this into some edible glue and direct this through the top of the flower right in the center, all the way through the back so that we're coming down through that larger piece of gum paste at the back. Let's just pinch the gum paste twist and twist impinge at the same time, dragging down a little bit of excess paste as we thin the bottom of that stem, and here we go. I love these flowers. You can just really play around with these petals, and they're just so whimsical and pretty. Let's set those up to dry as we did the hide ranges. Now we have I whole flowers.
5. Making the Lilacs: Let's look at how to make these really delicate little lilac flowers about. We'll take a piece of gum paste fairly small, and we're going to tie this very dark purple. We're going to make this into a little ball, removing all the crystals as before, and then taper this into a teardrops shape, but we have a fairly long stem at the back. Now taking it a little cone tool, we're going to just make another little hole in the center. This is a small cone tool of a small the point, because this is small flowers obviously, and then we're going to make a few little cuts. One, two, three, four, little cuts to make four petals. We'll just pull these petals out and then again squeeze those petals together so that we get these little points. Then we'll soften them by pressing those with our thumb and forefinger. Taking a piece of wire without the hooking, we would just dip that into the glue and drag this through the bottom of our lilac. It's exactly the same concept as many of the other flowers with just four cuts and then press in those petals right in to make a point. We'll put that aside to dry, and will run through once again how to do that. Again we've got our teardrop shape. I've made this a little bigger just so you can see it on the camera. We're going to take the cone tool making a lovely little divot in the center of our teardrop, and will make the four cuts with our scissors. Try and get these fairly equal when you do this, so equal spaces apart if you can. Then what we're going to do here, which is quite different to some of the other flowers, is you're really going to pinch those corners in. We're not soften in those, we're pinch in them so they're nice and tight and have a sharp point to them. Just pinch those in with your thumb and forefinger, and then we will soften this again without thumb and forefinger. Now you can use a cone tool and mark to do this, but because there's so many of these and they're so tiny, I wouldn't recommend it. This is the quickest way to make these. We'll look at an interesting parts now. What we want to do is take a teardrop piece of gum paste once again and just poke the wire into the bottom here. It should be a straight piece of wire without the hook. Mine had the hook on which is making this a little bit awkward. It was just the first thing I had to hand unfortunately. [inaudible] do not have a hook in the top of yours just keep straight. Now taking a blunt tool with a straight back I am using a scalpel, but this is a very blunt scalpel so don't worry about my finger being across the blade. But please use caution when you do this and do you something quite blunt. It's just make a nice little crisscross across the top of these with two lines giving you a beautiful part to fill in with the lilacs.
6. Making the Orange Blossoms: We're going to make these beautiful orange blossoms. We're taking in a Stefano's cutter which has five long petals. We're going to take our white gum paste, roll into a ball and again, using our 3D survey little bald, we will roll the gum paste into the medium sized hole, making a hat. Flip this upside down, and then we will place our small Stefano's cutter over the top, making sure that little gum paste hat is dead center and let's just pull that gum paste away revealing a small little flower. Taking a soft mat, and you'll notice this soft mat has the little holes once again. We're going to pop these petals out. I just used the back of my veiner tool because it's thin enough to do this and to make it' s way through the little gaps. We'll pop this out and we're going to place our flower over that little hole so that the little hat that we've made sits in there quite comfortably, and then take your veiner tool and just gently drag it from the very edge of these petals. Be very gentle here because in this instance we will roll the paste fairly thinly. What you'll notice is as we're dragging this veiner tool from the bottom to the top on that edge it is curly and those edges in, and this gives a 3D organic effect to your flour, making them quite realistic. We'll just pinch those ends in there. You can see we've kind of made like a little oat effect or a little shoe effect, or it's been cupped in. Those petals are just cupped in at the end. Using the wire with the hooked end, a little bit of glue and we will just drag this through the center once again. So just put in that up and then using that excess paste at the bottom to secure it onto the wire. We will just place this into a drying stand, like such, until we move on to add in these cute little centers to make up our own blossom. To do that, take a tiny piece of gum paste, very small. You want to roll it slightly into the tear drop shape. Then you want to take a little veiner tool with the cone point to the end and make a very small hole in the center. Feel free to put some corn starch or track some on the end of this [inaudible]. Now gently roll it all round, so you get a little hole and then you take the edge of the cone, and just drag it out,. We're just softening those edges and pulling them out, so they're a bit wider and the thing is, don't worry if this isn't super tidy because I will really just add to the organic fill to a little trumpet. There we have that, it looks like the end of a balloon, and then we'll just add a little [inaudible] glue into the center of our flower and just place our little trumpet in, just pressing it downwards on to the top of that flower.
7. Making the Jasmine Buds: In this cluster of flowers, we are going to actually make the longest stem that you can see here, and this is what we really add interest and give you different heights in your flower arrangements. Use 30 gauge wire for this, which is quite a bit standard than the wire we've been working with other flowers, and you'll see why in a minute. We'll take a good size piece of white gum paste and we are going to make this into a long sausage shape. Just roll this out between your fingers in the very top edge, but allows some thickness at the bottom of the gum paste. We'll take our very thin wire and with redness through the rest of the gum paste. We don't want this to poke out off the size, so make sure you've added a little bit of edible glare, and then a third of the way through, we'll just thread this gently through the gum paste. This can't be a bit gently, it might take some practice. Let's pinch that end and twist it. Then we'll slowly roll the gum paste down, so it's a little more equal in thickness taken off any excess from the bottom. Now we want a little bit of thickness at the bottom, because we're going to make some tiny incisions in the base with some scissors. I'll just roll this down a little bit more so I have the shape that I want. Then I will take some seven scissors and we're going to cut in very gently, two little snips. Make sure you don't go down to the wire, or cut the wire, we just want to slice the thickness of that gum paste, and then pull those edges out. Then we have adjustment.
8. Adding Colour to Hydrangeas: We're going to take these lovely green colors. We have avocado green, leaf green, and then we also have a lime green. We also have some plumbing colors and pink colors as well that will really help elevate this design. We'll take a set hydrangea, and we've got a nice flat, dry paintbrush, make sure it's completely dry, and we're going to go in with the lime green edible dust using our kitchen towel to just dust off any excess. Then what we shall do is taking the dust on our paintbrush we're just going to gently drag that from the inside outwards lightly over each petal, getting the color on layer by layer, and letting it sink into all those little creases that we've made previously with the veining tool. Less is always more, so I'd say just going slowly, going with just a little bit of dust on your paintbrush until you slowly build up the color. You may notice here, I'm not completely covering the petal, I'm leaving little sections clear so they're lighter. The idea is that you want the effects that different parts of the petal have caught the light. So there's highlights and the shadows all over these flowers. Don't forget to also add a little bit of dust to the back of these flowers too. Here already, you can see just with the first layer, the difference it has made. We'll go in with our leaf green, just taking that off and then we'll start adding that color more into the center of the hydrangea because that's where the darker bit would fall and that's why your shadows would naturally fall in the deeper creases of the hydrangea. It's just about built in layers and layers of color, and already again, we can see the effect it's got. Then finally add in the avocado, since it's just adding the green parts of the color and we're just good dust this little bit darker shadows just on the very edges on the back, just in randomly opaque places on the hydrangea. As you can see here, it really makes it pop. Now, here's the big secret you, want to take some plum color and direct this across the very edge of this hydrangea, and then just blend in any excess dust that's fallen over the top and onto the flat part of the petals. Look at the effects that this gives. Here's where most people wouldn't sink to add such a contrast in color on top of the petal, but it just gives such an incredible dynamic effect. If you look at hydrangeas in nature, you will say that the green ones as they dry, we'll have this very slight movie and plumbing tinge to the edges of the petals. I'm just going to keep layering that on add-in it onto the edge and brushing into the corners. Look at that, beautiful.
9. Adding Colour to Wall Flowers: We have our pink wallflowers and our orange wallflowers. We're going to go with this gorgeous tangerine color. With a round paintbrush, we're going to apply this quite generously over the top of this flower. Just taking the excess off on the paper towel as usual and just softly brushing this over the petals, covering the entire thing. We'll start always work from the inside out, just layering up that color. Then, we're going to go in with a very warm peach color. I'm going to use a small pointed paint brush. I'm just going to use this peach and just generally brush this into the center. Just shake it off a little bit of the excess. Then I'll just slightly drag that out, but not all the way to the end, so just building up the color, deep in the center of the flower and then just brushing out the excess dust so that it becomes more translucent as it works it's way up the petals. This just adds such a beautiful effect to these little flowers and really makes them pop. I absolutely love making these. There we have it. Now, I'm also going to go in with a little bit more pink. That's just to add a better highlight and just make these colors a bit deeper. I've taken a darker pink and I'm just brushing that deeply into the center again. Moving on to our pink wallflowers, we're going to cover this really vibrant fuchsia pink. I'm just going to brush this across. I'm using a flat paint brush here, but you can really use a soft round paintbrush or flat brush. It doesn't matter too much. Let's just drag that color around and over the edges. We don't need to do too much pink on this because it's already such a vibrant color underneath. We can be a little more sparing with this, and just working in those edges. This is the fun bit, is this beautiful violet color I have here. Just like the orange wall flower, we are going to take the violet, and pop this into the center and then drag this out. This colors is taking a little bit of a while to build up on the pink. It's a little bit subtle at the moment, but I'll just keep persevering until the color really builds up, and I just say, really look at nature, look at flow magazines, and really take note of the colors that you see in different flowers because this will really help when you're deciding on your own color palettes. Then just brush in that violet all the way across and it's highlighting the edge. Now, my top tip is always to go in with a little bit of green on a lot of your flowers. This really makes him pop and you'll see here, I'm just adding this touch of green just really lightly to the edges of the flower and this just really adds interest. I'm just brushing a little bit there, not worrying if it's too dark. Again, just going in with that little creases really letting the color work into those lines that we've made. There we have our beautiful wallflowers.
10. Adding Colour to Lilacs: We're going to go in with a bright fuchsia pink. We'll take that onto a flat dry paintbrush dusting off the excess. I like to hold mine inner cluster while I just gently take the dust across little corners of the petals. I don't want to cover mine completely. I just want to highlight the edges for real impact.
11. Adding Colour to the Orange Blossom: With the orange blossoms, we're just going to take a soft brown brush and we're going to go into this really lovely cream color, just taken some of the edible dust and building this up into the center of our orange blossom. Make sure these are really nice and dry that you've left them overnight before you start adding the color. We'll just start building that up. Don't worry if the color goes onto the petals, this would actually just look really lovely and make the flowers look really natural and beautiful.
12. Adding Colour to the Jasmine Buds: With the jasmine buds, we're actually just going to take a soft rose color. We're going to put this on a small flat paintbrush and just gently brush this from the bottom upwards. We won't take it all the way up the bud. We're literally just going to dust this very gently over the bottom of the Jasmine. This adds just a little hint of color and some interest. Keep the tops whites and just brush that color across. This is very simple and a very quick technique. We'll just cover all the others so that they match. There we have our jasmine buds, look at these against the actual jasmine flowers. They look perfect.
13. Grouping the Flowers Together: We'll take our bunch of small little buds and our big bunch of small blossoms for the lilacs and will start assembling these. Take your florist tape and just pull it to activate it, and I cut my tapes in half-length way so that they're a little bit thinner. I'm going to take my first little bud, and I'm going to pull the tape with the sticky side on the wire all the way around. Then I'm just going to put the tape about three millimeters all the way down, taking another bunch bend in it, so it's a little bit out of the way. Tape the part where the wire begins, and press that against the other wire, pull in the tape around to secure [inaudible]. Then we'll go in with a little blossom. Again, where the wire begins on the blossom and the stem ends, so just bend that way and then press that against our central stomp we've now made. So the idea is we're going to keep building these flowers up generally keeping a cluster of the buds at the top of the wire and then working our way down with small blossoms, and it's the idea that your younger flowers will be the last to blue, and they will be at the top of the stem. So keep doing this, working your way down the wire, and you will support about three to four blossoms a time around the wire at the same level until you go down the wire into your next row. As you go down to your next row, you can then add an extra flower, so 4, 5, 6, 7. Just [inaudible] general idea, you can be very organic with this, so don't worry about keeping it too structured in number. But if you do want that kind of Christmas tree shaped for you, have the points at the top and then larger blossoms at the bottom, and you can find a state for this method. So free all sides, so put in a few tiny little buds as well as you go down, and that will just really add some interest. So you can just play around with these. I have the same method in my Building Confidence in Sugar Flower Artistry class that you'll also see on the Skillshare platform. You'll see how to assemble flowers in a similar manner. We will just pull in that tape all the way down and just add in little blossoms and buds as we go , I really love making these. They're so fun and it's so great to have a little bunch of lilacs all together. Now there's a small bunch for you. So moving on to the orange blossoms, what we want to do here is we first need to cover the entire wire, with our first tape. This would just be because these wires will be exposed when we bunch them. So we kind of want to just have some consistency, and it gets them a little bit more strength when you want to add them to your cakes and start moving them around. So just pull your tape out again as before to activate the stickiness and then just take the tape to the top of the wire and secure it onto itself. Well, then spin in the wire and then pull that tape nice and tightly all the way down. As you spin the wire on your hand, and it will secure any nicely onto those blossoms. So I'll show you again up closely. I'm going to pull this tape, I'm going to take the sticky side and just twist it onto itself right at the top and then pulling it down, I'm going to just twist and pull and then snap that off. We'll do this one, the remaining flowers. Okay. So we just want to take some more tape. We're going to pull this out finishing the last blossom, and then let's bend these little blossom heads away from themselves and we will start securing them. So with this, we want to secure the second blossom a lot further down, the wire. Then we would tape with the lilacs, and then we want to take the next one and secure this now to the bottom so that a lot of the top end of the wire is quite exposed and it will allow them to move and they're not completely attached to each other. We're basically just securing these blossoms at the base. You can do three to five blossoms in a bunch. So I'll show you again. We are partway down the wire like three centimeters and then the securing the next blossom, making sure to pull them away, the heads away from each other so that they don't catch, and then we add the third one. Then just pull all the way down to the very end of that wire, and you just pull this out making as we need to. We have a really simple, nice little cluster of orange blossoms ready to go on the cake.
14. Final Thoughts: Thank you so much for joining me on this skill share class. Now you should have five really stunning blooms that you can make very easily. Keep them stand by and when you need them, put them into all those little gaps that you find in your floral arrangements. As you can see here you can also just group them together as one beautiful cluster and use them in your cake designs or even store them in a little glass on display. I love to do things like this. If you do find this class a little bit too advance, then please do go back and look at my building confidence in sugar flower, artistry skill share class. This will help you really get to the basics of how to use products such as gum paste and florist wire. These products do dry out very quickly so you have to speed up how quickly you work with these products. With time and practice, you will get a lot better and you'll build up so much more confidence that you can then move on to really large blooms. As you follow my skill share classes you will gradually graduate into larger flowers such as magnolias, peonies, poppies and much, much more. Make sure that you do make the most out of every single class so that you can really improve and advance so that by the time we come to those bigger wild flowers, you will be asked to make them with incredible pace. So in the meantime, I really want you to make a large cluster of each of these five blooms. Let's make about 10-12 of each flower and when it comes to the eyelets, we're going to need about 20 little eyelets and bugs to make a full flower head. Make these flowers, dust them in beautiful vibrant colors and upload your photos into the project gallery. Remember you can also post your photos on Instagram and Facebook and just make sure that you tagged @cakeandbesurprised. I can't wait to see your work and of course if you have any questions, make sure to post them in the comments underneath the class description. Happy crafting my budding botanist.
Nadia Jay, Sugar Flower Artist
