Mini Tutorial ~ Wildflower Molds for Bead Making

Hey everyone! As promised, today's post is another mini tutorial. Two weeks ago I shared the new wildflower molds I was working on. Are you ready to see the results?

Well… they all certainly were not as fabulous as I was hoping… the top four molds worked fine and had good detail, but the bottom four were not so great — some parts were either too deep or didn't show at all. Yes, the bottom two really are flowers, you just can't see the impressions!




Time to make more molds! Today's post was going to be on the bead making process, but since I needed to make new molds I thought I'd share that part with you first and then next time we'll start on the beads. So here goes…

(The molding compound I use is a 2 part 5 minute cold molding compound by Art Clay World USA)

Of course, I started with another trip out to my front yard and the fields surrounding my house. Living in the country sure does have its advantages! I picked more flowers than I needed — I wanted to have plenty for experimenting. I also made sure to pick some leaves too.

One of the main reasons half of my first molds didn't turn out well is because I was just blindly pressing flowers into the molding compound and had no way of knowing until the mold cured how the flower would actually look.

So this time around, I took all the bulky flowers and first lightly flattened them under a piece of glass. This allowed me to see how the petals would be arranged in the mold, and to carefully put them in place if needed before making the mold.

After flattening under the glass I pressed the flowers and leaves into the molding compound. When pressing the flowers in, I'm always careful to take note of the thickness and bulkiness of the different flower parts. For the mold above, I pressed the petals of the flowers deep into the compound, while only lightly pressing the flower's base — I want the main focus to be the petals and a big bulky base pressed in to deeply can easily ruin that effect.

More flower smashing! Not really — press just firmly — enough so the petals stay in place.

You'll get the best leaf impressions if you use the backs of the leaves where the veins are most raised. I like to add a little extra contour to my molds by pressing deeper on and AROUND the leaves, petals and anything I really want to standout. Adding that extra contour gives the finished casting a more raised look.

You can see that extra contouring here — around the leaves on the rectangular mold…

And here — I gave this mold a slight dished-out contour so the casting will be slightly domed.

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Once all the molds cured it was time to try them out. Here are the results of some testing — all the molds worked nicely this time around!

Alight, now it's your turn! Go out, enjoy the fresh air and pick some flowers… and make some molds! In two weeks I'll show you a few new beads you can make with your molds.

Have a fun!