Please take care to wear flowers in your hair

Sigh. I love San Francisco. That song has me reminiscing.

Here are some shots of the aforementioned rice-paper flower barrettes.

The process was simple but time consuming (isn't everything in the craft world?).

At first, I used a die cut machine to cut out the flowers but I didn't love them so I resorted to just cutting out flower shapes by hand. After you cut them out, you use watercolors to paint them. They come out muted but the colors bleed into each other quite nicely. The top one was done with watercolors. The bottom three were done with acrylics watered down. The girls had a good time painting those. The top one was the one *I* did.

While they are still wet, you have to twist the flower so that the petals start to crimp or bend in a more natural way. I finally realized a simple way to do this (we were all having problems with that part). I pushed the end of the paintbrush (the non-bristled end, I mean) into the center gently enough as to not tear the paper but firmly enough to be able to use the brush and twist around it. It seems the slickness of the brush makes it easier to twist instead of trying to twist the flower against its own paper petals.

Then you let it dry. It only takes an hour or so to dry but if you're in a hurry, you can use a hair dryer. I opted to let them dry naturally.

Once dried, you can take a fine marker and add details. That's how the veining got on the flowers.

They still looked a bit plain to me so I went to my bead drawer (yes, I have a bead drawer - doesn't everyone?) and took out some seed beads and used "incredibly tacky" glue. That glue name makes me laugh every time I read it or say it. I found it easier to put a little glue on the end of a sewing needle to pick up the seed beads. I was going to glue them anyway so I didn't mind the glue on the beads.

The clips are just quilter's clips from Michael's. I glued the flowers on the clips with hot glue. My concern was that the hot glue would peel off after a while so I also used the incredibly tacky glue too. It's supposed to bind to metal as well.

The top one is my favorite (no, not because it's mine). I love the tropical color combination there.

Now... to finish that d@mn sock...