US title: Simply
Style Faux Flowers
Sylvia Hague
Search Press
February 2012 / ISBN-13: 9781844488292
Paperback
How-To Books/Flower Arranging
Amazon
US
- UK
Reviewed
by Rachel A Hyde
Adorn your home with beautiful arrangements of silk flowers in
this flower arranging book with a difference. I remember when they
first came out in the early 1980s and how artificial they looked
compared with the ones you can buy today. The flowers chosen for
this book are particularly lifelike, and of course if real flowers
are more your thing you can use them for the arrangements just as
well. But silk flowers come into their own here, used for a variety
of occasions such as weddings, anniversarys, baby showers, Christmas
etc or to celebrate the seasons.
What you need for proper silk flower arranging surprised me; restore
tired or crushed blooms with the steam from a kettle, acrylic water
to hold stems upright, and plant stakes for anything floppy. How
much better my own efforts might have been with these extras! The
book starts with a list of common flower types and what they are
best for and then goes on to look at containers. The main body of
the book shows a variety of projects and how to do them, in Search
Press' trademark photographs and captions style. Arranging flowers
is not a skill I profess any prowess at, so looking at these and
seeing how the arrangements are built up was quite a revelation.
The section is divided into flowers for the home (ie the sort of
displays used as everyday ornaments) and flowers for special occasions,
many of which would certainly look most impressive and professional.
Finally you can discover how to look after the silk flowers, including
how to lengthen stems if you have cut them short and want to use
them in another project. There are lots of glorious colored photographs
in here of the finished items, although some of the smaller staged
ones were a little dark. Turn to the back and there is a list of
stockists if you live in the UK, rounding off a useful and pretty
user-friendly primer on a "craft" not often covered.
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