I’ve been working hard to get everything up and running for my new website design.  Part of the new site is having a shop section that has beautiful photos and descriptions that link out to my Etsy shop to purchase.  As I’ve been photoshopping and creating pop-up windows in Dreamweaver, I’ve started to hate my photos.  Not just my photos but the roses as well.  I feel like what I create now is much better than what I was doing 8 months ago.  So, one of my many tasks on my to-do list is to create new roses, new photos and replace everything on the site and Etsy with the goods.  That means that I need to create a ton of roses (144 to be exact), and each rose contains about 30 petals, so that’s 4,320 petals I have to cut, paint, assemble and curl before I can even think about taking pictures.

I’m trying a new approach this time around and I’m painting individual petals as opposed to the way I normally do it, painting after a rose is assembled.  This allows me to throw away a bad petal when I screw up instead of wasting an entire rose when something goes wrong.  It also means that I have hundreds of petals that need to dry without touching one another.  Soooo, I needed to improvise.  And here is my solution.  I’m hanging fishing line across my office and hanging paper clips along it with brads along the way to keep the paper clips spaced out (otherwise the weight pulls them all to the middle).  Then I punch a tiny hole in the petal and hang it up to dry.  A bit time consuming, but they are out of the way and being closer to the ceiling where the air conditioner vent is helps them dry much faster.  Thought I’d share what I’m working on!