Review: The Art of Handmade Flowers

I’m a huge fan of 1970’s crafts (you may have noticed), so I was pretty dang excited when the publisher of this book contacted me. The Art of Handmade Flowers revives that time-honored art we used to call “pantyhose flowers” here in the US.

This book was originally published in China a couple years back. The author, Jue Liu, is an avid gardener and brings her passion for flowers to the 70 (!) flower designs she shares here.

I’ve never seen many of these flower forms in any of my vintage craft books. They’re stunning.

Basically, all the designs start with a simple wire form and some stretchy nylon fabric. You stretch the nylon over the wire, anchor it with thread. And then you bind a group of petals into a flower.

There’s a very thorough basic instructions chapter that covers the materials and construction, and then supplemental photos and steps for each type of flower.

I can see all kinds of crafty applications for this kind of handmade flower. They can embellish clothes, bags, shoes, and jewelry. They’d make amazing wedding or party crafts. And you could use them in home decor – imagine flower-trimmed lampshades, or curtains, or frames.

You’d certainly have your choice of flowers to play with here – the 70 how-to’s include tulips, lilies, roses, freesia, sweet peas, gladiola, narcissus, crape myrtle, cosmos, plumeria, and a lot of others I’d never even heard of.

As you can see from these images. part of the beauty of the flowers is in how realistically Jue Liu has constructed the stems and leaves. The book provides some text hints for this part, but the simplicity and clarity of the photography allows you to study and replicate each plant’s unique structure.

I was also glad to hear from the publisher because as it turns out, they’ve just started a company dedicated to bringing nylon flower-making back to the US. They’re called New Sheer Creations, and a trip to their website will get you:

• A nice online preview of the book.
• A photo gallery of more flowers.
• All the supplies you need to make these flowers, including so many colors of the nylon fabric, in solids and wonderful blended tones.

Woo-Hoo! What time are you coming over for flower-making?

Tagged as: craft book, fabric, review