BY JEANNIE LINDQUIST
My quest for making botanically correct flowers and plants in miniature, started with my book, Mostly Paper, which explains my discovered technique to make wallpaper look like fabric. It is intended to inspire beginners into the world of miniatures as well as give those with creating experience some new ideas. I was pressed into finding an inexpensive solution because I needed a miniature table to display some small accessories as a gift as a supplier of doll’s house miniatures to my customers, the shop owners. I soon realised that I needed a flower arrangement in the centre of the mini table. Because I studied botany as one of my sciences at university, I am keenly aware of detailed accuracy.
Iceland poppy hand painted in magenta and white showing realistic buds and naturally, a fallen petal on the rock.
The desire for accuracy started early. I remember sitting on the sofa when I was about seven-years-old and working on embroidery. My mother had prepared a cotton flour or sugar sack by washing out remnants of food and the printing on the sack, and ironing it with an embroidery pattern. I had finished embroidering about half the pattern and was working on a curved design line at the bottom and had a problem because of a flaw in the fabric. I tried to correct the look of the stitching by taking it out twice and re-stitching, but created a hole in the fabric. I never finished the project.