I started this past week with the revolution that all of the techniques used to make silk flowers are, in fact, the techniques of Passementerie. This was kind of a huge breakthrough thought for me. So while the flowers were not made in the Passementerie guild halls by guild members, they were made using the same techniques and materials. This discovery sent me to the library to find lots of books about the art form know as Passementerie.

And good luck with that one! The Passementers are an incredibly secretive lot. They don’t write books or extol the virtues of their art form. But it is still an art form and is practiced to this day which in some odd way is helpful because it means there are people out there who know the correct way to do this stuff. (I’m all good if you were wondering.) So in looking for the history of Passementerie I had to broaden my search to include the whole history of guilds in Belgium, Germany, and France. I put together a list of possibly useful books and will order them next week.

I finished all of the little white flowers that I wanted to make (8) and I’m hoping it will be enough. I used a recent car trip to get them all cut out. I also have two lilies cut from the sheep parchment but I’m trying to be disciplined and finishing the two orange lilies that had to wait because I ran out of floss. I have two petals left to wrap, four to do the wire decoration on and two centers to make, then I can shelf those. The sheep parchment will be with a different orange which is lighter and brighter than the other two.

Which brings me to why this one is taking so long to wrap – I’m using a spun silk, seven strand but using a single strand that I’m untwisting as I wrap! What a pain in the arse. The result looks very nice and very closely resembles the filament silk but the time involved is extreme. I’m hoping that when I get back to the filament silk things will speed up considerably.

I think I will then have to start concentrating on the greenery. I will need a good bit of greenery for this to look right and I’m a bit behind in the greenery department. The best thing about greenery is that the leaves only need to be the same shape – matching the sizes of them is not going to be the time killer.

I pulled out some of my books on basket-weaving as well so that I could get some ideas for my fence. It’s not going to be an epic fence but I did want something that is more in keeping with the nature of my shrine and so just cutting the tops off or using decorative pins as the posts just isn’t a look I like. I could of course use popsicle sticks to make the fence (because I swear that’s what one example I have is made of) but, again, not the look I’m going for. Some of my examples are very decorative but not examples that feel right for my shrine. At least now that I have some solid ideas I can play with them in my head for some time before I start work on them. Projects always go better if I can mull over all the details in my head before I start working on them – pre-trouble-shooting as it were.

At this point I have exactly two months before I need to have it completed. I have a long, long way to go in those two months and I’m really hoping I didn’t bight off more than I can chew with this project.