miniature plants for a 2020 holiday gift
In an earlier post, I showed off how I made miniature spider plants for my friend for Christmas 2020. Along with spider plants I also made a few ferns, a monstera plant, and two miniature ivy topiary plants. The process for making the pots was the same (though some I painted differently) so this will just be a quick show-off post.
Ferns
I used two different types of paper for these – one is the same green velum I used for the spider plants, and the other is a pale green scrapbooking cardstock, which I then splatter painted with watered-down green and brown shades to get a more organic feel.
These were printed out using a Silhouette Cameo at the Maker Space I used to use regularly. Its been closed now for over a year, and I’m really missing it! I developed the design by copying really good illustrations of ferns, and then altering them to suit what I needed for this.
Like the other projects, the leaves were mounted onto green wire, and then inserted into the “soil” of the pots (as discussed in the previous spider plant post.
Monstera plant
Miniature monstera plant for my friend’s 2020 Christmas gift
Aka the “Swiss Cheese Plant” This was fun to make. I noticed from photos of living plants online that they were often staked, so I used a very thin dowel (actually a kebab skewer from the dollar store) and wound the stems around the stake in certain places.
When the plant was done I also sprayed it with a low-sheen varnish, to give the leaves some “gloss” but it didn’t have enough sheen unfortunately.
Ivy Topiary
Miniature ivy topiary plant for my friend’s 2020 Christmas gift
I’m actually quite pleased with this – enough that I made two to give her at Christmas, and another that I finished up later to give her another time.
I started making the two rings that make up the support – by cutting thin strips of printer paper, and winding them around a variety of different sized round objects after running them through a thin coat of UHU glue. Once they were done, I glued them together using a drop of super glue, and the “pauper’s bondo” to set them immediately.
Then I used the same concoction to glue the rings onto a wooden matchstick, and the whole thing was painted, and once dry, set into the “soil” of the pot.
Climbing ivy
Miniature gothic writing desk with an ivy topiary on top
For the ivy I did this two different ways, starting by twisting green thread into a four-ply tiny ‘cord’.
The first round… I coated the thread in glue, and then placed tiny ivy leaves little by little onto the cord. Then I wound the cord around the topiary. This worked pretty well, but threading it through the little loops was really tough.
For the second style, I glued the thread into the rings first, and then once it was dried into place, I attached a series of tiny ivy leaves onto the topiary. This worked a lot better for me.
The ivy leaves
Miniature gothic writing desk with an ivy topiary on top
The ivy leaves were also made of two different kinds of paper… one that was a LOT of work, and frankly… just not worth it.
I’d read that you could make your own ‘vellum’ paper by soaking printer paper in baby oil…. I loved how the spider plant worked with the ready-made vellum, and thought this would be great. I painted printer paper in a range of greens, browns, and blues, and then soaked it, dried it, and ironed it flat again in preparation for the free downloadable paper cut pattern from Thicketworks. Once it was dry I also splattered it with white.
This was… a lot of work. And honestly, in such a tiny scale, totally not worth the effort.
The other leaves were just dark green cardstock, cut out and splattered with white paint. This worked JUST fine. Perhaps for the larger leaves this would make a good difference – however for these topiary plants I used the absolute smallest leaves.
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miniature plants for a 2020 holiday gift
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