Making Silk Flowers

This beautiful book explains the art and craft of making the most natural-looking silk botanicals. With clear step-by-step sequences, it considers the details of flowers and demonstrates how you can make immaculate interpretations from a range of silk and millinery fabrics. Anne Tomlin, a passionate and renowned silk flower-making specialist, generously shares her ideas and techniques so this intricate practice can be enjoyed by all milliners, textile artists and designers. Encourages forensic observation of the structures and colours of individual flowers Gives instructions on techniques, including how to paint with dyes and mix colours, stiffen silk, and shape petals and leaves Explains how to capture the detail and essence of more than thirty flowers, from the tiniest common daisy to the complex tightly-pleated English rose Features over 400 beautiful illustrations, including templates for each flower. This book studies a variety of flowers and shows how to recreate them in silk using unique and individual techniques. Inspired by flowering blooms, it encourages experimentation and problem-solving to discover sympathetic methods of making silk flowers to immortalise their fleeting beauty. It explains how to capture the personalities that make each of these flowers individual, encouraging you to observe the wonders of nature more closely and to think about how you might interpret what you see.

Anne Tomlin is a trained milliner who, for more than twenty years, sold her work to prestigious stores around the world, including Harrods, Liberty, Saks Fifth Avenue and Mitsukoshi.Her passion for nature and conservation led her into bespoke flower-making. She begins each flower with a detailed examination of her subject to reveal its essence, and then interprets each piece in a variety of silk, velvet and millinery fabrics. Her flowers demonstrate a forensic attention to detail; they stretch the boundaries of the art of flower-making and expose minor details that often go unnoticed.The ideas and techniques in this book are based on her experiences as a teacher and a maker. She hopes to raise awareness of the natural world and the importance of its conservation through her complex detailed studies of flowers.