Tweetle Dee Design Co.: June 2023

Wednesday

New Wilde Bloem Flowers

Our two new Wilde Bloem flowers are releasing today. We are excited to add Bloeming Sunflowers and Wilde Clover to our growing collection of floral inspired barn quilts, barn quilt kits and patterns. Both of these flowers are dear to our hearts because of the symbolism in each of them. All of the Wilde Bloem flowers were chosen for their meanings and for design elements that make them extra beautiful in paint and cloth quilts.

Bloeming Sunflower Barn Quilt

Bloeming Sunflower Barn Quilt Kit

The Bloeming Sunflower and Wilde Clover Barn Quilt Kits include a Farmhouse Planked Barn Quilt Board, a pattern and our Prairie Paints to complete each of the barn quilt designs. The barn quilt boards are 12" square and when painted in a set, make a beautiful piece of wall art, they are also pretty darling as individual quilts.

Bloeming Sunflower and Wilde Clover Barn Quilt Patterns

The Wilde Bloem Barn Quilt Patterns come in full color print that we can ship to you or in a PDF download that you can print yourself. All of our 183 patterns can be found in Our Shop . All of our pattern include a full color diagram of the barn quilt, a line pattern, Prairie Paint color selections, and our How To Paint a Barn Quilt instructions. These patterns have been a reason to celebrate, dream and create for many DIY barn quilters and we hope these designs inspire you to paint one too!

Wilde Clover Mini Barn Quilt

Wilde Bloem Barn Quilt Kit
The Wilde Clover is the symbol of good luck, blessings and fortune and we loved painting this in our freshest Prairie Paint colors. My favorite is the Alfalfa Bloom, which is the dark and vibrant pink. Then again, two of my most loved greens are there beside it. You will love painting with our own blend of gel-chalk paints which have superior coverage and vintage inspired colors you will love.
We hope you are inspired by this Wilde Bloem Collection and will find something to stitch, paint, quilt and love about these special flowers.

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Thursday

Wildflower Pottery

The day our snow is melted we are out looking through the grasses and rocks on the mountain for the first peeks of those colorful blooms. This year I wanted to preserve the first of the blooms with these farmhouse pottery slabs. So, I went for a walk in the field to find a few beautiful flowers.

They are so easy to make and so beautiful hung in a collection on a wall, or displayed with your favorite blooms. It is also a great way to preserve special blooms from bridal bouquets and other special occasions. You can make them tiny for a single petal or bud and wear as a necklace or you can make a big slab and recreate your garden in pottery. There are no limits to the ways this technique can be used to bring lasting wild flowers into your home.

The materials are few and relatively inexpensive. You will want Polymer Clay. I have tried using Air Dry Clay and it is so temperamental and brittle, it is sad to loose your blooms to weak clay, so I clearly recommend using the Polymer Clay. I love to use Sculpey Polymer Clay . It comes in lots of colors and is so smooth and easy to work with. The directions were straight on correct and my projects always turn out perfectly using their clay. So get some! Price point is anywhere from $2.50 to $9.00 for a pack which will make 3 to 4 floral pottery pieces.

The Polymer Clay comes out hard like a brick. You will want to break off a piece and knead it in your hands until it gets soft and workable. Polymer Clay is made of plastic PVC material and softens as it is worked. So kneads a piece and roll it out to be a 1/4 inch thick. I like my edges to look like a slap of clay and not perfectly cut. You can cut your shapes and edges with a knife, but again I love the natural look of rounded fingered shapes. Use a toothpick or dowel to make a hole in the top to hang it from and place on a non-stick baking pan.

If you are wanting a relief of a flower, lay it down on the clay where you want it to mold and lightly roll over it with a rolling pin to make the indenture. Lift the flower off of the clay and bake at 275 degrees for 15 minutes.

If you want to preserve fresh wildflowers with all their color, pick blooms that are soft and will flatten well. Lay your blooms onto the clay in the place you want them to be and roll over to flatten them into the clay. Use tweezers to position any petals that are out of place and tap lightly into the clay. Pick off any that are standing upright and will not lay down. Heat your oven to 275 degrees and bake for 20 minuets.

The baking process will dry out the flowers and the colors will dull just a bit, but the sealer will refresh them in the next process. Let the clay cool.

Use your finger to lightly brush off any loose petal crumbs or leaves that popped up during the baking/drying process.

To seal your wildflowers, lightly brush over the baked flowers and clay background with the Sculpey Satin Glaze. This liquid is the same component as the Polymer Clay but without the fillers, so just as the Polymer Clay dried hard, this satin glaze dries clear and hard over your clay piece to seal in the petals and other parts that may not have laid perfectly flat.

After you have lightly brushed this over your clay piece, return it to the over for 5 to 10 minutes to bake it clear. Watch closely as you can over bake it and turn your piece brown...(I know). Bring it out of the oven and let cool.

Use the tip of a needle or other tiny sharp object to clear the hole back out and your DIY Wild Flower Pottery piece is ready to hang!

If you are looking for suppliers of the Sculpey products, I found mine at my local Hobby Lobby. I hope you enjoy this DIY project! It is one of my favorite of all time. I know I say that often, but for real, this was so easy and relatively quick to make.

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Tuesday

A Good Place

The Thistle is a flower with special meaning to my family in New York. I grew up hearing how the land the farm was built on was chosen by a blind, many greats grandfather named Conrad Lasher. He traveled to Steuben County with family who were commenting on how big and tall the thistles were growing on the prospective land.

He asked to feel them and was led to the field and said after touching the purple flowers, "Any land that can grow Thistles this tall, is good land". They bought the farm and the woods and it all grew, just like the Wild Thistles.

Today I had a long walk through the farm fields along the river near my home that is 2000+ miles away from the family farm in NY. The rainy summer we have had, with it's afternoon thunderstorms has reminded me of my NY summers. As I came around the long stretch of waving fields, there was one very tall and beautiful Thistle. Behind it, the mountain we love on.

I walked past the pink flower and then turned around to go back and take a picture. As I looked through the lens I saw this one lone thistle plant and our home behind it. I paused and took a deep breath in. One of those that you remember always and then as I was heading home I looked to my left and saw the two tall blue Harvestor silos across the river and field.

On our farm in New York were two Harvestor's just like the two in the field in front of me. I walk this trail several times a week and they are a landmark for me, reminding me of home. The rain, the thistle and the silos all combined this morning to bring a little bit of my NY home to me in Utah.

The message I took in is just like my Greats Grandfather Lasher said, a couple hundred years ago, "Any land that can grow Thistles that tall is good land." and so this land that we have made our home is "good land" too. It's all good when we receive it, with a heart willing to love it and share it.

So, this was my Celebrate, Dream Create moment for the week. Maybe, there will be a few more. I celebrate the words of the past and the experiences I had growing up that made me fall in love with the peace only nature can bring, and the home we have grown into. It took a weed to symbolize the dream and hope of growth. That is a message to think about too this week.

I hope you have a wonderful week ahead full of things to celebrate, hope for and lots of creating.