How It’s Made
Forty petals, one at a time.
This is what actually happens between a lump of clay and the thing in the photograph. It is slower than you think, and the slow parts are the ones you cannot see.
One rose, start to finish
A single-stem rose is the smallest complete thing I make. It takes two and a half hours. Here is where they go.
Cut, thin, vein
Each petal is rolled paper-thin, cut to shape, then thinned again at the rim with a ball tool until the edge goes translucent. Then pressed into a silicone mould taken from a real rose. Around forty times.
Shape and assemble
Every petal is curled over a fingertip while still soft and left overnight to cure. The bloom is built from the centre out, each layer opening slightly wider than the one beneath it.
Colour
Dry pastel worked into the clay in three thin passes — deepest at the base of the petal where a real rose holds its pigment, fading out towards the edge. Colour goes on after assembly, never before.
Sepals, thorns, leaves
The sepals curl back the way they do on a rose that opened two days ago. Leaves are cut in threes and fives, veined, and set at the angles a real cane gives them.
Stem and seal
18-gauge wire, wrapped in floral tape, sheathed in clay. That is why you can bend it. A matte sealant last, because gloss is what makes fake flowers look fake.
2.5 hours
For one flower. A dozen is thirty hours, which is why a dozen costs what it costs and why it takes four weeks.
The four hardest things I make
Dandelion clocks — ~200 parachutes
A seed clock is not a texture. It is roughly a hundred separate seeds per head, each with a thin stalk and a splayed crown of fine filaments, attached one at a time to a domed receptacle. The open yellow blooms are worse: around two hundred narrow ray florets each, square-cut and notched at the tip, all cut by hand.
Field poppies — 100+ stamens per bloom
Poppy petals are effectively tissue. They crease rather than curve and they are crumpled at the base as if just unpacked from the bud, because that is what has happened. Then the centre: over a hundred fine black stamens per flower, each one placed individually around a ribbed green seed capsule.
Foxgloves — 25 hollow bells per spire
Each bell is built as a genuine hollow tube, flared at the lip, with a real cavity inside — a solid one reads as fake instantly. They are graded large at the bottom to tiny closed buds at the tip, and the throats are hand-spotted one bell at a time, a different pattern on every one.
Morning glory — tendrils wound on a rod
A morning glory sends out fine curling springs that grip whatever they touch. Each one is rolled thin, wound by hand around a rod, and left to cure in the coil. There are dozens on the hanging wreath, and the vines trail over a metre. Six hours of the thirty-eight are tendrils alone.
A bonsai is a different job entirely.
The hawthorn starts as heavy wire bent into a trunk line, built up in clay and worked over for days. Hawthorn bark is deeply fissured and spirals as the tree ages — every ridge is cut and dragged by hand with a fine tool. That is twenty-five hours before a single leaf goes on.
Then forty-plus lobed and toothed leaves, cut and veined individually. Then around fifty berries, each rolled, given its five-pointed dried calyx, coloured in a graded orange-red and wired on in clusters where they would actually hang.
Eighty-five hours. Two months. One at a time.
What I will not do
Moulds for whole flowers. Veiners are taken from real leaves and petals, and that is where casting stops. Every bloom is assembled by hand, which is why no two are identical and why the listings say so.
Gloss. Almost every mass-produced artificial flower is sealed shiny. Real petals are matte and slightly translucent. Everything here is finished matte.
Even colour. A flower that is one flat colour reads as plastic from across a room. Pigment is graded within every petal and varied between blooms in the same arrangement.
Rushing a piece to hit a date. If a lead time will not work for your occasion I will tell you before you order, not after.
Every listing shows its own studio log.
Open any product and scroll to “why this piece costs what it does”. The hours are broken down by task, on every single page.