Wildflowers In Sugar Craft

1. Introduction to Making Boho Wildflowers: Welcome to my latest Skillshare class, that is all about making Boho themed sugar flowers. Now I call this Boho sugar flowers because they're very organic, have real natural feel, we'll look at how to make edible mushrooms, everything is very tiny per see and whimsical, and just free flowing and this is really a thing that we are go for. Now, a little bit of history behind this class, I actually have a commission for a Boho themed wedding cake in May of this year, and so while I was making all the flowers to go to this cake, I thought it would be the perfect opportunity to share how I make these flowers with you guys. In this class, we'll look at how to make edible mushrooms, forget me not flowers, which are these tiny bright blue flowers that we find a lot in England around springtime and you find, if you plant a few, they will just seed absolutely everywhere and you'll just have a carpet of this gorgeous blue in the spring. They're absolutely stunning and because my color pallet in this project is quite muted, these blue really adds a pop of color and will just look absolutely stunning in your designs. We'll also look at how to make really delicate little daisy flowers, this are so fun and pretty to make and perfect to add as a little feel of flower into any sugar flower arrangement. We'll also look at how to make these lemon colored ruffle flowers. These aren't particularly based on a real flower that you find in nature, but that's just a really fun and pretty flower to make and they will really look fantastic if you're going for a boho themed sugar color design. We will also look at how to make little arthur mercies, which you can see here, and this is just starting to get you guys advancing into making wyatt petals and the center for a flower. We'll start small because once you master how to make the smaller flowers in the later classes will start looking at how to make the larger flowers like your magnolias and your. Then finally, probably the trickiest part of this class will be how to make the sugar flower gum paste edible frost. Now as you can imagine, frost blades are very thin. We're going to be working with a thin wire and trying to add gum paste successfully onto this wire so that it does look like a textualized and beautiful blade of frost. You might find this a bit fiddly at the beginning, but I guarantee you, once you get the hang of this, you'll be able to make these really quickly and they're just really impressive to have into your sugar flower arrangements. I guarantee you people will start looking very closely at your arrangements, and asking how you made certain areas because they're just look so intricate and realistic. In this class I won't particularly be going over how to add a lot of color to each of these flowers only because I have covered this in previous classes. It is exactly the same method as before and as what I've already been through with you guys but if you are very new to Shrink of Croft and you're not really getting the hang of how apply the color, please feel free to go back to my previous classes where I cover all of this. The same also goes for arranging these flowers, we'll also cover how to make a few tiny leaves, again just using simple tools. I haven't covered how to secure these into an arrangement because again, you can learn this in my sugar flower class that covers the very basic. So let's take a look at the supplies we want to eat. 2. Wildflower Supplies: For this project, we will need a non-stick mat that we can work on, and also a board that has these Mexican hat holes. We will also need a softer mat with the Mexican hat holes, but you'll notice with this, it's made from a foam. There will be various tools we'll need, such as dog bone tool, your ball tool with different size balls on each end, and also, a petal or leaf vein tool. We will need some thin scissors, needle nice pliers, and a non-stick rolling pin. This Culpitt Stay Fresh mat is really fantastic for when you're cutting out lots of petals. Alternatively, you can use an airtight lock and seal bag. We'll need a daisy cutter or plunger, a five-petal blossom cutter or plunger, and a cherry blossom cutter, all in the smallest size. You'll also need the first two smallest cutters in your rose petal cutter set. We'll need some edible glue and various paint brushes. A paint palette or petal forming tray, cotton thread, and various florist wires. I like to keep sizes 18 up to 30 at hand. Most importantly, you really will need a very high quality sugar flourished paste or gum paste. A full list of the supplies you will need with links to where to purchase these will be found in the class description box. Let's get started. 3. Mushroom Tutorial: So what we're going to do here is we're going to start making these really cool little edible mushrooms. Now you'll need a piece of 26 gauge wire and a good sized piece of gum paste. We're just going to roll this and get out all the pieces and then starts to roll this into a little fat sausage shape. But just keep in the very top end around it. So it just kind of make an a stem and just keep him one end as a round teardrop shape so that we can use that for the top of our toadstools. So I'm just going to work that down. Thin in out what will now be the stalk and then I'm going to take my index fingers and just kind of stop working at into the very bottom of that kind of teardrop rounded shape that we've made at the top. So just working at that end, smoothing that out and then you can actually just kind of take your index finger and just slightly soften round the very edges. Just soften that, pressing the edges downwards. So you'll kind of making the top of a pin for example. I'm also taking the very side of my thumb and I'm kind of just digging this in as I twist the mushroom around in my hand. That will kind of just thin out the very underneath of the mushroom. So there we have it. Then I'm going to take some edible glue and I'll just put this onto the wire and then thread this about third of the way through the stalk of the mushroom. Just pinch in effect gum paste onto the wire so that it's nice and secure. We'll leave that overnight to dry in some polystyrene. Then I'm going to add this edible brown color from Rolkem. This has a really beautiful gum free finish to it. So this is really lovely to just add some interesting definition to the top of the mushroom. And I'm just gonna kind of roughly dust that onto the top of the mushroom just brushing that out all over the top of our toadstool. Sorry, I'll just interchange between mushroom and toadstool, but it's the same thing. Then a little bit of that has gone onto the stalk but not worry because let's just brush that into and it will just make it really organic and add lots of interest. Now I'm going to go in with this Nutmeg Brown which has a matte color and is little bit darker, because I need the top of these mushrooms to have more definition. So we'll let that, I'll point to all soft round paint brush and just brush that really nicely on top and build the color up again. Remember that you can do this with any color that you wish. You might want to try and play with blues, some reds or purples, especially if you're making a really kind of Alice in Wonderland or fantasy style cake. You can play around with the size as well from upstream. So just make sure you get really creative and keep practicing and making small mushrooms and large ones. Then we have it, our little mushrooms. Really easy to do. 4. Daisy flower tutorial: Let's make these into daisy flowers. I've gone ahead and added a small piece of yellow gum paste to the top of a 24-gauge wire and I've just let these set overnight, so they're nice and firm and easy to work with. Now, taking your gum paste, a product that I love to use is called Petal Base, this is almost like a tracks. It's a vegetable shortening base product, that you can just rub on to the surface that you're working on, to make sure your gum paste doesn't stick to the board. Alternatively, use cornstarch. Now, we're just going to roll this out and taking a daisy cutter, we are going to cut out two daisies per daisy flower that we're making. Then we will take the smallest size bowl on our bowl tool, and just slowly work around using gentle pressure, work around the edge of each flower, kind of really gently rolling out, and softening each of those petals. They can stick a little bit sometimes, so always feel free to just add a little cornstarch to the top of the flower, or even you can add this to your bowl too. Don't worry too much if it does tear a little bit. This will just add to the overall effect of the flower and just make it look a little bit more realistic and art of interest. I'm just going to keep going, working out each petal as softly as I can, so we get these really nice little ruffle effects. I'm going to make a little hole in the middle of both of these flowers, and you can do this with either a toothpick. I'm just using my little vain and tool here to do this. Then take in your pre-made daisy center badge. We're going to just add a little piece of glue to the bottom of the badge. Then just paste this through the pre-made hole. I just pre-made the hole because it's a bit easier than trying to tear it with the wire. I just find it gives you a more precise finish. Add a little bit more glue to the next layer and we will threat that flower on top of the other. Excuse my hands being in the way a little bit here. But I will flip this over so you can see. We're basically just layering on the shapes. Then we'll put it in a Petal Former to dry out overnight. 5. Forget Me Not Tutorial: It might be sweet little forget me not flowers. You'll need a piece of [inaudible] with a hook made in the very top of it. Then we will need some baby blue gum paste, even smaller piece of white gum paste, and then an even smaller piece of yellow gum paste and you'll see why in a second. We'll take a larger piece and then using this Mexican hat board, we're going to go in at the smaller hole, and place the gum paste over the small hole and then just work that gum paste into the hole and then rolling this out so that we thin it. What you will see is that when we turn it over, we have this nice little top up on the end. I'm going to take my five piece blossom cutter, and take that over the top making sure that the center bit that we've made is in the middle of our cutter. Just press down to reveal our blossom. Then take a small piece of the white gum paste and we're just going to roll it into a ball, and then just flatness this with our finger into the very center of the flower. Then you want to take an even smaller piece of the yellow gum paste and then place this in the center, and then just press that down in with your cutting tool. What you can do is make little shapes in here with your dressing tool, just make a little bit of a definition. But you can always just flatten this down as well, that's not a step that you necessarily have to do. I'm going to take my soft mat and place the blossom in the smaller hole again, and then just using my dog bone tool, work out those little petals soften them as I go. Just to make it more delicate and more realistic and we'll just press in the center of the forget me not too so we blend in the yellow and the white gum paste. Taking some edible glue, we'll put that on the top of our wire with the hook in and we would then drag that down in the very center of our forget me not flower. Then tapering that gum paste onto the wire itself so that it holds really nicely and is secure. Then we can kind of crinkle and bend those little petals in the shape that you wish to make them more realistic. I had to squeeze some of these and play around with different shapes just to add interest. Then we can leave that to set overnight. You can also add a little bit of color to these, building up the color if you wish, with some edible blue dust. But we'll set that up in some polystyrene ready to be placed on our cake. 6. Thread Top Berry Tutorial: We're going to take a piece of 24 gauge wire. Then we're just going to take our needle nose pliers and just hook over at the very top of the wire. But we're not going to close this in. We're going to take some ivory sewing thread, a long piece and we're going to fold this over itself like this three to four times. We'll fold it again, and we'll fold it another time, we're looping it over, so that it is looped onto itself just like this. You just want to have a little hoop available to then hook your florist wire through. We're just going to hook that through the little hoop we've made with the thread, holding that tight and then just closing the end of that hook down onto the base of the wire, so that we have a little piece like this. Then we'll just take some florist tape. I've cut my florist tape in half, so that it is just a thin piece. We'll stretch it to activate it, and then we will just take that tape and just secure it around where we've attached the thread to the hook. This will just keep everything in place and make sure that it doesn't move too much. We're just wrapping it a little bit around the base of the thread that's on the hook. Then taking it down the rest of the wire just to secure it. Just drag that down now. Let me cover the wire. Now, what you need to do is get some scissors. I use just very thin sewing scissors here. I'm just going to cut straight across off that hoop, so that we have this nice little fluffy bit here. That will be the top of our berry. We're going to take a little piece of gum paste. I've colored this a deep blue so you can go for black or purple or whatever color that you want to dye your gum paste. I'm just going to take a little bit of edible glue and just put this on the very base of the wire. Hold the base where we've made the threaded top and then just smoothen out all the wrinkles on our gum paste. We're simply going to just pull the berry from the bottom of the wire through to the top, and then just secure that nicely to the base. We just put on it through and then leaving that fluffy little piece at the top to make our threaded berries as I call them. These are really cool and really interesting and fantastic to add to your designs. 7. Ruffle Flower Tutorial: Using the same method that we used to make the forget-me-not flowers, we're going to take our Mexican hat board, and we're going to go in on the smallest hole on the board with our yellow gum paste. I've dyed this a very pale lemon yellow. I'm going to roll this out with my rolling pin, just smoothing it out so it's nice and thin. As you can see, we've got our little hat top here on the under side that we've made. What we need to do is, flip this over and take our little ruffle flower cutter, our five piece blossom cutter, and just place that over the little hat top that we've made, and cut out the shape. Then what I'm going to do is I'll move this onto a soft mat placing the hat top into a nice little hole so it sits there comfortably and we don't really want to squash or flatten down that hole. Now, I'm going to take my treston tool or vana tool and just gently press that in and drag out. We're pressing the tool down into the center of the flower and then dragging it out a few times on to each petal, making these little line indentations. It just adds real interests and makes them really floaty and Bohemian. With our wire that has a little hook on the top, we're going to put this into the edible glue and then just thread this through the very center of our flower again. Remember, we have that little hook at the top of the wire to help the gum paste have something to secure onto. Remember, we'll just taper off that excess gum paste so that it sits nicely onto the florist wire and it's nice and secure. There we have it, a beautiful little ruffle flower that can be made in lots of different colors. Remember to play around with those petals as well and shape them so that they're a nice little ruffle shape that suits you. You can really play around and make them look like they're moving in the wind. 8. Grass Tutorial: For the challenge and Paul, we're going to make these really whimsical piece of grass, sugar craft. These are actually not too hard to make. You need erasing piece of wire. I'm going to go in hand with a 28 gauge wire. You want to wrap this in florist tape first. Now, I only need half the width for this type. A really neat trick is if we fold this over on itself, and then we will fold it again. Then what you can do is cut right down the middle with some scissors and then you will half your tape. You can also buy florist tape strip cutters, but this is a really easy way to do it without investing in additional tools. We'll just unravel that and then we will pull it to activate the stickiness. We're going to just wrap this from the whole entirety of the wire. We're just doing this because it will help the gum paste sticks to the wire, as well as it will be finished and ready for us to place on the cake. Take some gum paste, we'll need quite a small piece. We're going to keep this dyed green already. Alternatively, you can go with white and colorless. We're going to roll this into a really thin sausage shape. Now in the video, I will actually show you this thicker than I would usually do it myself. Add an edible glue to the end of the wire. We are now going to thread this through the entirety of our thin sausage gum paste shape, so that we almost to the very end of the gum paste, but not poking through. You're going to twist the gum paste as you go along the wire. We will then take our scissors and start cutting in at an angle, being careful not to cut right through, but just slicing it down, twisting as we go, alternating the sides. Don't worry if some of the wire is showing through as you cut. But typically, I would do this a lot thinner with a thinner piece of gum paste. However, for the video, I will show you this with a thicker piece of gum paste. Start with a thick paste and then go as thin as you can possibly go without losing the structure of the gum paste. Just slice it all the way up leaving the very tip to be pointed, and then we can just gently brush out these little pieces here. With practice, you'll be able to make your grass even thinner. I'm going to just pinch this top here. Then we'll leave this to dry overnight. Now we can add some colors to this once they are all setup and dry, I'd like to go in with a darker green. So I'll just take my flat paintbrush, dusting off the excess. I will just gently brush this in an upwards direction over the grass. I'm going to leave the very tip of the grass without this color on because I want to go in and add a pink edible dust. That just adds some interest. Again, I encourage you to play around with your color palette here, test out different colors. Maybe go in with some yellows, some browns, maybe a little hue of purple, or mauve. Definitely play around with this and go for colors that really suit your style. But just very gently, brushing that on, being careful not to press too hard will be too rough as we will start to break-off those nice little pointy pieces that we've made. I'm now going to go in with my really pale pink edible dust and then just gently brush that over the top. I don't want to make this too strong a color, I just want this to have a really nice hint of pink. Again, this is just to really add some interest in our cake displays and flow arrangements. 9. Small Leaves Tutorial: To make these little leaves, you won't need any cutters. I have made these in previous classes. I've taken some gum paste and I've dyed it a eucalyptus color using this gel based paint by Sugarflair. Of course, you can dye your paste any color that you wish, but I really like the bluewy tines that it gives. I've rolled my gum paste into a little pointed teardrop shape, and I'm going to take a piece of 24 gauge wire. You can use 26 in this case. Then just thread this just a fifth of the way into my gum paste, and then just work down the very base so that it secures itself onto the wire. I'll just flatten that with my finger so it's nice and secure, and then I'm just going to take the end of my little veiner tool, but you can use a small rolling pin for this. I'm just going to roll out just the very top of the paste. Now, I'm going to take my veiner tool and drag a line through the center and then just make some gentle little diagonal lines on the edges of this leaf, just to make some really simple tiny little flowers. Then we'll just curl and pinch in those edges, pinching in the top, and just making sure it's nice and secure to the wire, so we have a nice little ruffled and whimsical leaf like this. You will see when we secure them all together, you can make a nice little spray of pretty vine leaves to add to your flower arrangements like so. 10. Small Open Rose Tutorial: We're going to go in with these pieces of 30 gauge wire. They are very thin, but we will need these to make the stamens for the center of our demos. With our yellow gum paste, am going to take a tiny piece, and I'm going to roll this and then make it a current shape just by tapering off the very end of the gum paste, as you can see here. I'll add a little bit of glue to the end of that wire, and we're just going to thread this through the bottom of our newly made stamen head. This can be a bit fiddly, but with practice you will get used to it. It's a great way to save on cost and make your own stamens rather than purchasing them. We'll just taper the end of the stamen or the gum paste down on to the wire and then just twist in and taking off any excess paste, just making sure that it's really secure. Again we want to do this with the other wires, and then we will leave this overnight to set up and dry. To make the petals for the rows, you will need a small petal cutter and then a larger petal cutter, so we're going to take the true smallest petal cutters in our rows cutter set. I will show you how to do this firstly, without using a cutter, you will take a bowl of gum paste, and we will roll this out, but it needs to be fairly thick. We're just going to roll this out into a really rough little petal shape. You will have to use your natural instincts to do this as you don't have any immediate guidance. Taking your 24-gauge wire, you want to add a little bit of glue to the end, and thread this through the very center of this petal, making sure that it doesn't show through the front or the back. You may want to go in with a 26-gauge wire to do this as it will be thinner and allow you more room. We'll put this onto a soft mat, and then we will just softness with a bowl tool. We're just going to soften these edges very gently with gentle pressure, allowing the bowl tool to be half on the mat and half on the edge of the petal. Color those in your fingers to your preferred shape then leave them to set overnight, press down into a little painter's tray, so we get this really ideal shape that we want to go for. We will need three of those petals in the smallest size. If you do have a cost to set, that's fantastic, we'll go in with the smallest casa in the set and we'll make our first little petal. Taking a wire and a little bit of glue. We're just going to thread that through the bottom again. Make sure you do not overload your wires with too much glue as this can just make the petal slide off radiantly and your fingers will get so sticky, and it will make it really hard to work with. Printing this on our soft map again, we're just going to really slowly and gently soften those edges and then even gently pull the gum paste outwards to make it a little bit larger and just more interesting, and I really love the calm my edges, and just to add interest and make it really organic and whimsical. Again, we'll just press that into the tray and leave that to set overnight. Now with the next size of the petal cutter, there is the next size in our set. We will now need to cut out five larger petals. Just roll that gum paste fairly thick again, we don't want to go too thin with this because we do need to allow enough room for us to put our wire through the center. We'll just cut out five of these petals. Now remember, gum paste does dry out very quickly. As you're working with this, make sure any petals that you are not using, you place into an airtight bag, container or better still, if you can purchase one of those specially made acetate mats, you can actually place that over your petals to make sure that the air is locked out from them and they don't dry out before we get to add all these beads, full ruffles to the edges. Again, we're just going to go in with my bowl tool and soften out those edges of the larger petals. We'll color this again, and we will leave them to dry overnight in a paint palette so you can purchase petal formers online or in your local craft store, or you can easily get hold of these paint pallets, which I prefer to use, they are very inexpensive. Now what we want to do is we've got our stamens, and we have our forest tape here. We are using half the width, again of the forest tape as previously shown, again to stretch it, to activate it then I'm just going to place the tape around the very top of the wire securing it onto itself, and then just place in each stamen and next to the other, whilst twisting in the tape around them so that they are nice and secure. This is exactly the same method as we used in previous classes. Go check out the assembly of sugar file is in my very fast skill share costs on the platform. Taking the three smallest petals, we're going to gently bend these back, make sure they are nice and dry, and that they've set up pretty well overnight. We are going to take the first one pressing that into the center of the stamens that we've made just underneath the very bottom of them and securing the tape round. We'll take the very next one, place this at an angle next to the first one that we've laid in, and then we will just take the tape all the way around again. Then we will take our next ones. If you think of a face of a clock we are doing this as 12 o'clock, eight o'clock, and four o'clock, and then we have the first layer of petals. Now we're going to go in with our five petals and these will essentially fill in those gaps that we have, so the first gap that we have here will place the larger petal behind, and we will just take that tape all the way round, we will then go in with the next petal at the next corner and then our next petal taken in that gap, fill in that gap in, so we have three little petals round there, and you can leave it like this. To get a row round shape I want to place in a few more, so just play with those petals around a little bit and find the next best place and gap to put the remaining two petals. This gives you just a really organic and beautiful shape. I absolutely loved making these flowers, and we'll definitely be making a lot more. I really do encourage you again to really play around with your color palette when making these flowers. 11. Final Thoughts Wildflowers: Thank you for joining me and we will now be my third Skillshare class. I have really enjoyed teaching you guys how to make these beautiful little Bohemian theme sugar flowers. Practice really does make perfect, so please do not lose hope if you do find that you're stuck may be a little bit with making these flowers. If you find it hard to really capture the method, then go and check out my previous class, building confidence in sugar flower artistry, the basics. Remember share your work in the project gallery and post your questions if you have any at all, because I'm always here to provide feedback and advice. You can find me on all social media platforms, the Instagram is where I hang out the most. Get creative, play around with the color, and don't be afraid to experiment. Sugar flower art should be really personal to you. I really want to encourage you to find your own style when creating these flowers. Until next time, my Budding Botanist.