How To Make Your Beaded Flowers Look Lifelike

It's a shame to see beaded flowers that are very well-made but still look stiff or too artificial. There are a few things an artist can do to help make their beaded flowers look more lifelike. As with everything else, it's in the details.

You don't necessarily have to use exactly the same shade of beads in every flower on a spray. Take a look at some roses from the same bush. They can be different shades. The flowers that are just blooming can be lighter; the ones that are dying can be a "dustier" shade; and the ones in their prime can be a more robust color. Also, sometimes a flower can pick up stripes, spots or colored edges as it ages. Take some time and explore this idea.

Of course, living flowers don't have any wire in them. Beaded flowers should show as little wire as possible. For dense flowers with a lot of layers, this means covering each layer of stemwires with a row or two of tape. This way, the inner rows of petal wires won't show through the finished wire.

Also consider using wire that's colormatched to the beads. There are many colors of wire available now, so matching should be easy. If you're using transparent beads, you can even create slightly different shades of flowers by using different wire colors. This color will show through the beads.

Here's a fun idea: Don't cut your top basic wires short. Leave them long. Add beads to them, fold them down the back of the petal, and twist the wire in with the other stemwires. Voila! No visible top stemwire at all. This is especially useful if you are making a pin or hair decoration. The wearer's hair or clothing will not get caught in a top wire that's been cut off, because there won't be any end there.

Lastly, be sure to keep your finished flower stems slim. You can do this by reducing the bottom wires to 2 instead of 3 when you're making petals that require a bottom loop during construction. It may not sound like a lot, but you'd be surprised how much wire you can delete if you use this technique with a dense flower. If you're just learning how to make beaded flowers, be sure you learn this technique.

For all the materials you'll need, including lots of colormatched wires, please visit my new Amazon store at http://www.BeaderSupplies.com.

Happy beading!

Damaged Bead Flowers - Not a Lost Cause

For some amazing before-and-after photos in video form, please go here!

I have just finished renovating, restoring, and resurrecting four dilapidated vintage bead flower arrangements. As with many other things we encounter in life, what looked like a fairly simple fix expanded into a very large project.

The flowers had many problems. They had been made around the 1960's, so were made with all-steel wires. This in itself might not have been a disadvantage, except that unfortunately the arrangements had been immersed in water for cleaning several times over the years. As a result, all the wires had rusted and many had turned black. The rusty water had flowed down over the stems and had badly stained the silk floss wrapping. Finally, the arrangements had been left or stored somewhere that was terribly dusty, so the thick, clumpy dust on them was really more like crust. Also they had become badly crushed.

What made the whole thing so disappointing is that at least two of these poor arrangements had come from Bonwit Teller. This high-end department store in New York City had had a gift shop for a number of years, and the bead flowers from this shop were of the finest quality and were very highly regarded. One of the "founding mothers" of French bead flower making in America, Virginia Nathanson, had taught herself the craft by buying an arrangement from this shop, taking it home and completely taking it apart in order to learn the techniques.

I felt I really had to restore these four pieces to their original state, as best I could. Here's a thumbnail of my fixes:

Dismantle all the arrangments; uncouple sprays of flowers. In some cases, remove leaves from their flowers and unstem the flowers.
Clean with plain baby wipes, rolling the rows between my fingers.
Remove all thick, rusted lacing wires.
Re-lace with new colormatched 32-gauge wires. In this process I invented a new lacing method so as to hide the lacing on flowers whose inner and outer surfaces would be equally visible.
Cover rusted top basic wires with whitish nail polish.
Where necessary, reattach petals to flowers and flower heads to stems.
Where necessary, add new leaves where old ones were unsalvageable.
Re-wrap stems with floss.
Reassemble sprays.
Clean containers.
Replace styrofoam or old clay with new clay and fresh moss.
Re-pot, rearrange and photograph refreshed arrangements.

If you have or if you come across old and sad-looking bead flower arrangements, don't write it off right away. It may be salvageable!

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