When I decided that it would be fun to make some lily of the valley I didn’t really give a lot of thought to the part about them being so incredibly tiny.
They’re teeny, teeny tiny.
So I made some, but they’re slightly bigger than the real thing, just by virtue of the fact that my eyes were crossing when I was trying to make them smaller.
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Amazon supplies for gumpaste flowers:
Two-step process to make the flowers.
After wrestling with them for a while, I figured out the quickest way of doing them would be a two-step process.
Make the teeny little bells first, then attach the wires after they’re shaped and have dried a little bit.
When I was trying to wire them then shape them they wouldn’t hold the wires well.
The only way that I could find that other people had made them was to make the bells out of a solid piece of gumpaste, then they shaped the little petals.
I wanted them to be a little more hollow, but there wouldn’t be enough paste to hold the wire then.
The solution that I came up with was to attach the wire with either chocolate or royal icing instead of inserting the wire into the flower itself.
If you shape the bell, then the petals, then let the flower dry, you can attach the wire to the inside with some yellow royal icing, which will mimic the color of the stamen.
The flowers are going to be curved downward anyway, so you probably won’t see the inside, but it can’t hurt to have a little color inside.
Some other tips would be to use white wire and paint it a light green for the stems, and yellow on the inside of the flower.
The fastest way to make them.
Here are the steps I came up with as being the fastest way to get these made:
Make a Mexican hat and cut the petal shape. I used a 5-petal cutter, real LOTV have six, though.
Pinch the petals and flatten them out.
Use the dogbone or a ball tool and hollow out the flower. Shape it up around the tool so that it’s a cup shape.
Curve the petals back.
Put the flower down and insert a toothpick into the center of the back to make the hole for the wire. Let it dry like that.
Take a wire and wrap it around the toothpick a couple of times to make a “knot.”
When the flower dries enough to hold the shape, insert the wire into the hole and pull it almost all the way through.
Put a small bit of royal icing or melted chocolate in the center of the flower and pull the wire the rest of the way through so that the knot in the wire is stuck into the icing.
You can add another dot of yellow chocolate or royal icing to secure the wire once the flowers dry, or just leave the green wire visible.
Once the flowers are dry, tape them together and bend the wires down into the hoop-shape.
