Tutorial - Enameled Flowers

I've had a number of inquiries about the enameled flowers I made for my Simon Says Stamp and Show project last week so I thought I would do a tutorial on them.  Now I am a rank amateur on doing tutorials so be kind, please!  I am using the Ranger Melt Art Melting Pot.

To construct my flower, I used the dimensional flower tutorial on SplitCoastStampers and my trusty Tim Holtz Tattered Florals (yeah, I know you are tired of hearing how much I use that darn thing).

I used Very Vanilla Stampin' Up card stock and ran the die cuts through the SU Vintage Wallpaper embossing folder.  Antique Linen distress ink was used to ink the edges and high spots of the dry embossing.  I curled the edges, glued and shaped the flowers prior to coating them with the UTEE.  Do NOT assemble the two petal piece.  You will coat that one uncurled.

Because I was not going to dip the flowers, I didn't need to melt much UTEE.  I learned from the first round of enameled flowers that after the UTEE sits and cooks for awhile it thickens and is hard to work with.  Plus I inked the edges of my petals and some of the ink released and colored the UTEE.  It became very yellow and sticky and I ended up discarding a good quantity of it.  I learned to heat a little at a time and add a bit more as needed.

I had used my brush for the UTEE before so it had hardened but was softened up by laying it in the melted UTEE.  You will want to use a brush with natural bristles (not nylon/synthetic) so they don't melt.  I was only able to get three sessions out of a brush before it started losing the bristles and leaving little hairs on my flowers.  I'll have to experiment with brushes to see what holds up the best.

Time to start painting the UTEE on the assembled flowers.  Spread out a non-stick craft sheet so your flowers don't stick.  Work quickly because the UTEE hardens fast.  Paint on a nice layer, not too thick or too thin.  Don't worry if it looks lumpy and rough.  You can hit it with your heat gun later, re-liquify the UTEE and smooth it out nicely.  I started by holding on to one petal, painting several, letting them cool and turning so I could hold a petal that had already been painted.  Paint some on the edge of the back of the petals too.

For the smallest piece, the one for the very center of your flower, curl and shape it but then uncurl to coat.  I laid it right on the melting pot tray and very quickly coated it on both sides.  Lifting it out, after it cooled a couple of seconds but before it hardened, I rolled it up tight.  Again, don't worry if the UTEE is rough and lumpy.

Now its time to smooth out all the rough UTEE by running your heat gun on each flower piece.  You can see the front most petal here has been heated and is now nice and smooth and shinny.

Here they are, all nice and shiny and ready to be assembled into a beautiful enameled rose.

Thanks for your visit.  Let me know if you have any questions.   I'll be back later this week with a very short tutorial on how I made the smaller enameled flowers.

POST UPDATES:  A reader asked if it was possible to make these flowers using UTEE without the melting pot.  Yes, you will likely need to do two coats of UTEE and it's pretty messy but it is possible.  I made one like that before I purchased the melting pot.

Another reader asked about the staging for my photo.  That's actually not a card the flower is sitting on, but rather bits and pieces that have been floating around on my craft desk.  I wanted a pretty little background for the flower to take the picture so I grabbed a felt heart that I had cut with a Nestability and sewn with a blanket stitch.  I had intended to use it for a Valentine's card but it never seemed to fit.  There is also a chunk of crocheted lace and a strip of Very Vanilla paper that was embossed with the Textile embossing folder and sponged with Vintage Photo ink. Oh, and the edges had been punched with a Martha Stewart border punch.  Basically I grabbed what was at hand and made a stack to sit the flower on.  The stack is sitting on top of a blank sheet of Baja Breeze card stock. It's as simple as that!