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Flowers From Fabric
| Article
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14748 |
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Section : |
LIFE
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| Issue
Date : |
11 / 1988 |
2,059 Words |
| Author
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Judy Ford Hogan
Judy Ford Hogan, an internationally known floral artist, is
the author of Fabric into Flowers. |
Feathers and seashells were used by early Chinese and Italian artisans in an attempt to fashion replicas of flowers, the most beautiful of nature's gifts. Today, using a clever combination of twentieth-century fabric, convenient household products, and a few items normally found in the trash pile, you can add a contemporary twist to this ancient art.
In 1756, Diderot's Encyclopedia of Science and Art told of a master flower maker named Seguin. Though trained as a chemist and botanist in Paris, Seguin applied his scientific knowledge of plant life to making artificial creations of flowers, plants, and trees, complete with fruit and gnarled bark. His botanically accurate specimens decorated palace interiors with life-size gardens. Seguin fashioned his creations from fabric, parchment, silkworm cocoons, grains, and wire thread.
Seguin trained others to help his with his thriving business. By the end of the century, Parisians enjoyed a worldwide reputation for their excellence in flower making. About the same time, French émigrés introduced the art form to England and as immigration to America increased, the craft quickly crossed the Atlantic.
In 1854, an article in Godey's Lady's Book, a popular magazine of the day, discussed the state of the art of flower making America. An elegant artificial flower exhibit at the next World's Fair in Philadelphia displayed handmade flowers constructed from paper, palm leaves, straw, shells, chocolate, soap, wood, marble, porcelain, human hair, and earthenware. But the most beautiful were made of fabric.
Although some fabric flower makers today employ many of the techniques and tools used in the Victorian days, a clever combination of twentieth-century fabrics and sizing (applied to fabric to add stiffness, so that petals or leaves retain their shapes) greatly shortens what was formerly a lengthy and complicated process.
The two keys to this unique method of flower craft are using only 100-percent acetate fabrics, such as taffeta and satin, and spraying the fabrics with a light misting of ordinary hair spray, aerosol or pump-style, for sizing.
Identifying 100-percent acetate fabrics is simple; fabric manufacturers are required to label each blot of fabric with its fiber content. Acetate taffeta and acetate satin, both popular dressmaking and lining fabrics, are available in any fabric store in a myriad of
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