October 29th, 2009 
Kelly The last piece of creating my roses is to curl the tips. This really helps to give the flowers more definition and make them look even more like real flowers. It is tedious and time consuming, but they turn out beautiful when they are done! Here are a few examples of what they look like once curled.
October 25th, 2009 Kelly Step 3 in the rose making process is hand painting each rose with watercolors. Depending on the rose, some are painted twice, one with a base coat and then again with a different color for the edges.
Once they are painted, they need to dry. I’ve poked lots of holes in my wall between my kitchen and living room to give me a place to hang them upside down which is ideal so the petals don’t dry flattened. This batch was a bit too much so I had to make due with flat drying some of them.
Once they’ve had ample time to dry (which is enhance here because my air conditioner vent blows directly on them (and yes, it is still hot enough in southern California to have the air on) then they are ready to be curled. That’s another step for another day. For now, here are some pictures of the huge bunch I painted this weekend. Check back for more pictures once the curling is done. I’ll keep you posted once I have new products up on etsy. 
October 24th, 2009 Kelly (Yeah you read that right, I skipped over step 1 and got right into the interesting part! )
I thought I’d post some pictures of the process of making my paper roses. I’ve been working non-stop for about 2 weeks to make a half dozen of each color rose that I make, which equates to about 5 dozen roses. Doesn’t sound like a whole lot, but start to finish it takes about 30 minutes to make one rose. So you can see why it has taken me so long. I didn’t take pictures of all the cut paper petals as I thought of this after I started making them. But here is the next step. I try to do a production line type set up and get all of one step done before moving on to the next. Here is what they look like once they are cut and assembled into a rose before they are hand painted.
All the roses stacked together to make a nice pretty mountain of paper goodness.
A little closer detail on the shape of each petal. After they are painted they are curled on the edges and you won’t see this defined shape as much.
I spent 4 hours last night and 9 hours today painting all of these roses. Check back tomorrow for Step 3: “We’re Painting the Roses Red!”
Posted in 
Tags: 
