Painting the Roses Red

I've discovered that my camera really doesn't like Real Red, which made it difficult to get good photos of the rose topiary my friends and I made for the Mad Hatter tea party last week.

The colors were heavily edited in this and it still doesn't look right, but it was the best I got on the night.  So a day or two later, I took that topiary out in the backyard to get some pics with natural light, hoping that would work better.

So, it was better, but not totally awesome.  Still, you get the idea.  If you want to make one of these, here's how to do it in eleven easy steps:

1.  Email me.  I will try to talk you out of it.
2.  Buy a Styrofoam ball, a dowel, and some kind of container to use as a base, and sweet-talk your husband into drilling holes for you and gluing the dowel in place.
3.  Paint the Styrofoam ball, either green or the color of your flowers.  At least, I would do this part if I had it all to do over again, because the white Styrofoam peeking out between the flowers offends my OCD.
4.  Con two (or more!) friends into helping.  Bribe them with baked goods.  It helps if your friends are crazy too.
5.  Cut five million cardstock flowers with SU's Spiral Flower die.  Really, this is going to take a lot more cardstock than you think it is.
6.  Roll up the flowers...this is where it's good to have some minions working too.  After the first dozen or so, your fingers start to hurt.  We were doing most flowers with two die cuts rolled together to make the roses look fuller.
7.  Have the bare topiary set up and ready for foliage.  Use a hot glue gun to glue each flower together, then stick it on the Styrofoam ball.  For this particular topiary, we did the first half of it with one of us wielding the glue gun, the second person attaching flowers to the topiary, and the third person rolling more flowers.  And I think all of us were wondering why we decided this was a good idea when we could have just bought some real roses.
8.  If you're the one using the glue gun, accept the fact that you will burn your fingers, and get glue everywhere.  Any glue that's left on the rose petals and won't come off is now DEW so it's artistic.
9.  Repeat ad infinitum.  By now your friends have probably had to leave, so you've condensed the three-woman operation into a one-woman blockbuster activity.  Tell hubs he has to make his own dinner.
10.  Cut out three million more cardstock flowers and start rolling up some smaller ones to squeeze in between the larger ones where the Styrofoam peeks through.
11.  Come to grips with the fact that you're just not going to be able to cover all that Styrofoam, and realize that most guests at your tea party probably aren't going to examine the topiary in minute detail anyway.

We did just a few roses that were part red, part white because the cards got interrupted before they finished painting the roses red.  A few of our roses kind of unraveled a bit when we put them on the topiary, so I rolled up some really tight rosebud-looking pieces to add into the flower centers (see the red and white flower with the all-white center?).

We had lots of thin strings of glue everywhere but quickly figured out that it did no good to try to get them off while you were still gluing flowers everywhere, so we just waited until the end to try to remove them all at once.

I'm not sure exactly how much cardstock this took because we die cut a bunch of hearts to use as decorations too.  Between the hearts and the roses, we burned through an entire 12x12 pack plus a whole 8.5x11 pack of Real Red cardstock, so like I said, it took a LOT.

If I ever start thinking it would be a good idea to make another one of these sometime in the future, hubs has been instructed to confiscate my glue gun.  It's probably both cheaper and faster to buy real roses.  True, these roses won't die, but still!

Thanks for stopping by today!

Supplies:
Stamps:  None
Ink:  None
Paper:  Real Red, Whisper White
Accessories:  Spiral Flower Bigz Die, Gumball Green stitched satin ribbon, green jar, glass thingymawhozits they sell in the fake floral section at your local craft store, wooden dowel, Styrofoam ball, hot glue gun