Victorian Flowers Part Two

These instructions are from Cassell's Household Guide via Marjorie Henderson and Elizabeth Wilkinson from their book Whatnot: a compendium of Victorian crafts and other matters, published by Morrow in 1977.


This set of instructions was a primer for what the Victorian housewife was intended to do to create realistic paper flowers.  After practicing with patterns she was to go on and dissect real flowers using those as a guide to her own creative endeavours.

A Mrs Delaney, who lived sometime in the late 1700's was so known for her abilities with the recreation in paper of real flowers, that the King and Queen sent new floral discoveries to her first, so she could immortalize them in paper. Unfortunately, this photo is in black and white, but the intricacy can still be appreciated.

So let's get started.
Get the directions and template here.

These are the shapes.  I cut them out and numbered them with the number of petals required of each.  If you do them out of tissue, just cut lots.

Here's the little ball.

 This is for crimping.  I found after a while, that crimping several petals at once worked better and the tissue didn't tear.  Wrap loosely, push the petal up to the end against the finger of one hand and use the other hand to force the petal together from the bottom.

There the petals are crimped.

and grouped ready to go.

Make the next set of petals curve.  I used the end of my awl on a mouse pad.  The shaft of the awl comes in handy later for the last set of petals to help create the reverse curl.

So here's where I think I messed up.  After getting to the end, I am pretty sure that the balls belong on the inside of the rose and maybe those petal should also go the other way, bending towards the centre.  See why you need to be looking at the real thing.

The last set of crimped petals go in between the others, again refer to my comments on the last step.

So here go the out petals.  I am pretty sure that they are going on the right way.  If you were a Victorian lady doing this, it would be about the time in the afternoon that you would be expecting your tea to be served and you would be wondering where your housemaid was.  You'd wander into the yard to find her collapsed under your 100 pound oriental rug that she had to drag outside to beat the dirt out of, a job she naturally does every Wednesday.

I added a little tab for gluing, because just looking at the bottom of this rose, I knew it wouldn't work otherwise.

Voila, you think, one done!  The maid had better get up before the neighbours see her and think you allow her to nap midday in the yard.

Only 10 more, the stems and leaves and careful arranging in a papier mache vase and you're all done.  Won't the ladies of the Temperance League be impressed.

Have fun and happy crafting!

Victorian Paper Flowers: Part One

Or the Pastimes of the Newly created Middle Class Woman:
Or Anything Worth doing is worth doing Well
Or Making or Doing it Yourself is more Economical

It is interesting, when reading the manuals created for women in the home, to note the tone with which the advice was given. For a woman brought up in 20^th Century North America, or Europe, the paternal tone might be a tad abrasive. If we delve deeper, we see something quite different, I think. The authors of these tomes expected their readers to carry out and distinguish themselves in very complex tasks that required a great degree of skill, patience and most importantly, time. They did not think of their readers as dullards, silly or incapable, but rather the opposite.
But what was the point of it all? Was it just to fill the new amounts of time that Victorian middle class women found they had? Why did they have all this time? I hope to answer some of these questions for you and not to bore you too much.
One of the points was economical. Cassell’s in his household guide stated,
“For we believe it will be found by many that when they have learnt how to obtain economically the necessaries of the household, and to do for themselves what hitherto they have had to get done by expensive assistance, they will have in every case something left with which they can augment the convenience, the comfort, and possibly even the luxury of their house and living—bettering at once their mode of life and their measure of enjoyment”
The belief in the economical running of a household was extolled by Samuel Smiles, an influential author of the time, in his book “Thrift”. Thriftiness was a virtue Smiles encouraged and he believed that an intelligent industrious woman was the key to a happy well appointed home. “Men themselves attach little or no importance to the intelligence or industrial skill of women; and they only discover their value when they find their homes stupid and cheerless.”
Paper flowers could be produced for a third of the cost of real flowers and thus create beauty in the home, but use the family’s resources in a responsible way.
Time, as the cabbage flowers I will show were supposed to take about 3 days to create, was the primary resource used by the Victorian housewife. The Victorians were obsessed with the newly discovered germs and cleaned like crazy. Fortunately, labour was cheap and most middle class homes could afford at least one servant. She was expected to rise by 6 a.m. and it was called “considerate” to release her from her duties at 10 p.m. She didn’t get a lot of time off, even to go to church on a Sunday. The housemaid was expected to proceed directly from church services back to the home of her employ. With household chores cared for by the housemaid, the lady of the house did have larger amounts of time on her hands. This time might be spent visiting with friends, attending social/church groups concerned with helping the poor or unfortunate, or she worked on various projects to create a cheerful home.
If you would like to read a couple of resources about Victorian life and middle class ideals, “Thrift” by Samuel Smiles can be found at http://ia311324.us.archive.org/1/items/smilesthrift00smiluoft/smilesthrift00smiluoft.pdf
And links to all three volumes of Cassell’s Household guide can be found here
University of Toronto Library

Preview

So, I spent some time today at the Royal Ontario Museum Library.  Bet you didn't know they had a library that was accessible to the public.  I didn't.  I was looking for some information on Victorian paper crafts, not just the directions, but the directions as the Victorian ladies who would have used them would have found them.  Well I found an awesome book describing not only Victorian paper flower making, but how to make your own scrapbook which isn't very scrapbook like and an oriental accordion book which is very recognizable as a mini-album.

Tomorrow, I'm off to the Reference Library to look at a book on the history of Scrapbooking.  I love history, I love looking at the origins of things and I love scrapping, so why not combine my loves and then share.  I am hoping to share all my finds here on my blog.  I hope you enjoy them as much as I enjoyed finding them.

Scraptivity May Kit

Well April didn't bring us much rain, but Scraptivity is fulfilling the promise of May anyways.  The May kit is all about you letting your creativity bloom by creating your own flowers.  You can make them out of paper sure, but the kit also includes ribbon, paper towel and coffee filters.  You heard me coffee filters! I played with magazine pages and the other designers had other ideas.  Go over to the gallery to check it out.