Forget-me-knots & starting again..

My Dad gave me the Forget-me-knots growing in our garden and I've been waiting for them to reappear. He loved flowers and spent as much time as he could in his garden and was more than happy to share cuttings and seedlings.

Such a totally gorgeous blue colour, some with white or some with yellow centres..

Love the way they can also have little light pink or mauve colour flowers..

Spring is a symbolic time of re-awakening and never more so than this year it seems. It's been a fair while since I last wrote but to be honest, the end of last year was tough and I gave priority to family. We lost Dad in November.

I don't want this to be a sad 'poor me' post and things are more settled now but I've missed my little blog. I've missed crafting, I've missed thinking of random projects with historical or folklore themes to put on here. I need to put that right again.  So, I'm starting with the Forget-me-knots - it's the sweetest little unassuming & free-spirited flower and this time of year you can see it everywhere.  It's not fussy where it grows and it will self-seed and create a lovely border if you let it.

I've had it in my head that I would like to use some pressed Forget-me-knot flowers to make a pendant (..and I guess always have a bit of Dad in it somehow - he had lovely blue eyes when he was young too) but I am a little too impatient to press flowers in a book and wait months like I used to when I was growing up, so I made myself a small microwave book and experimented with how long to 'cook' them for to get them just right.

It's a tricky business but eventually they came out looking like this... 

...however, as I discovered, you can then ruin them instantly when you try to pick them off the tissue!

Carefully does it...

Still... trial & error and lots of patience have prevailed and I eventually had enough to begin experimenting with. First off I lightly glued them onto some paper and used some Mod Podge 'dimensional magic' to create the pendant look.  I was quite excited to see what it would come out like but, alas, the next morning they had all but lost their colour!  

Where's the colour gone?!

They still look quite pretty and I guess I might still set them in a proper frame but they weren't really the look I was going for.  

So, I have been working on my technique and there is another pendant setting tonight.  

will it... won't it...?

If it works I will do another tutorial and make a pendant with it.

To be continued...(wish me luck).

RIP Dad xxx

All photographs & text (c) Addicted to Making 2015