DIY Cheeky Roses

[Perry Winkle]

Very, very cool.

[BigV]

Same one, rotated a bit. I used different pieces of leather, with different dyes and slightly different textures for the red roses. I like the variability it brought to the flowers. A little bit of leather anti-aliasing, if you will.



Now I will show you how to make the stems of the roses. This is a lot of braiding, I will try to show the move, then just repeat it until your fingers fall off or you run out of leather. This braid is called a four-strand round braid without a core. When the flower was begun, there was one green and one brown lace crossed at the center. They come out of the bottom of the rose and I arrange them with two on the left and two on the right. This arrangement is constant throughout the braiding process.

On each side there an outer strand and an inner strand. This braid works the outer strand, always. It alternates from one side to the other, but you're always manipulating the outer strand. This is the starting position Please notice the INNER two strands have been crossed. This is an arbitrary choice, obviously they've not been "braided" but they'll be the seed for how each of the subsequent strands lie in the braid.

Notice the brown lace on the inside, the lace closest to the camera. It has "finished" its swing and landed hanging to the left. That means the next strand will finish hanging to the right.




I pick the OUTER strand on the right side, swing it behind the braid (here comes the trick to be repeated forever) under the first (outer) one and over the next (inner) one, ...




... ending hanging to right. meaning the next one will finish hanging to the left, so I take this OUTER strand on the left, behind the braid, under the first/outer strand it meets...

[BigV]

so I take this OUTER strand on the left, behind the braid, under the first/outer strand it meets...




and back OVER the next/inner one it meets,...




.... pulled tightly, hanging to the left. If you look now, I've done one strand from each side and the braid looks exactly like it did before I began. The inner two are crossed with the top one hanging to the left.




Like I said, I took a lot of pictures. Here's a collage of this very braid with each strand being manipulated then pulled tight. After a couple inches, I thread into the mix a strand of leaves, snugging the base of the leaf tightly into the weave. Seriously? This was many, many hours of braiding.

[BigV]

Eventually, you get to the point where one of the strands doesn't have enough length to keep braidng. I snugged the strands tight (a different braid, the name escapes me now, but it's the same one you use for making keychain doodles from gimp.)

Congratulate yourself.




Then get back to work.




Eventually, you get a bouquet looking bunch of individual roses. I wrapped them up in this gorgeous brown piece of leather like a bunch of flowers from the florist, and I gave them to her like this. But I wasn't done yet.




I had intended to make a flogger all along, and I decided I needed a handle with some heft to it. The leather is heavy and a heavy handle would give it some balance. I had an idea that a flexible handle would be interesting. I went to Goodwill and bought a pair of ankle weights, the squishy neoprene kind. This particular set had a double ring of weight. I wanted to change it from a ring to a straight segment, but I could tell all the filling would spill out if I just cut it. So I sewed a pair of seams across the weight.

[BigV]

Then I cut the neoprene between the seams.




I only spilled a little of the contents. I bet this looks familiar now, doesn't it? I thought it would be sand, rock is heavy, dense material, right? Well, so is iron. This stuff looks like the spatter from welding or cutting. I don't know the name for this material, but it is easy to clean up with a magnet. And it's heavy. And it's a way to make money from what would otherwise be waste material. Kind of like the big bags of "free sawdust" I saw outside a local cabinetmaker's shop yesterday. (Yeah, I'm wondering what I can do with a few cubic yards of white pine sawdust... soil amendment?)




Here we see the beginning of the handle construction. I bound up the stems with tape and wire. You can see I tried to make the weight the core of the handle.




The length looks ok.

[BigV]

Here I've bound it all up so I can wrap it.




See how junky this looks? I'll tell you now. I didn't know it at the time I took these pictures, but alllll this work would be undone.




It was just too uneven.




Too lumpy.

[BigV]

Some sides looked ok.




And some camera angles were more favorable than others.




Ok, that purty leather wrap? Now I decided to cut it up and make it the wrap for the handle. Here I'm measuring for length and circumference (of the handle).




Snip snip.

[HungLikeJesus]

Originally Posted by BigV

Kind of like the big bags of "free sawdust" I saw outside a local cabinetmaker's shop yesterday. (Yeah, I'm wondering what I can do with a few cubic yards of white pine sawdust... soil amendment?)

Perhaps you could use it for oil spill absorbent.

[BigV]

This is what I got at the end.




Fweeee! The beginning of a round braid of six thongs.




Once I got the wrap on the stems, it then became clear I'd need to undo some of that braiding. **SIGH**




I tied each braid off TWICE 1/4" apart with waxed thread, using surgeon's knots. I damn sure didn't want these things coming unthreaded. That would be... bad.

[BigV]

Then I began to unbraid the strands of the stems just up to the ligatures.




Now I had a much finer handful of strands to surround my handle core. I tied this bundle up too, and carefully straightened the strands, minimizing the crossings. One thing that is NOT visible here is how I snugged the core up tight to the top of the handle. I took a couple strands and tied them around the bottom of the weight. When I pulled the strands tight, it drew the weight up very tightly to the top. I put a square knot in these strands and then draped the remaining ones along the length, just as you see here. The white threads are tight too. The core is pretty secure.




I rolled this core against the table to make it rounder. I actually put it on the floor and rolled it under my foot too, but no pictures of that. Since the core isn't round (it's a kind of figure eight in cross section, remember?) but it is filled with moveable material. This really smoooooths out the contour of the core/strands for a nice round handle.




Rolling...

[BigV]

Rolling...




Rolling...




Purty, no?




Ok, this is the beginning of a turk's head that covers the top of the handle wrap at the transition between the handle wrap and the falls of the stems. Forgive me, I can't remember the number of turns and bights for this knot. Like a lot of this project, what you're seeing here is just the last try. I redid this knot a few times.

[HungLikeJesus]

Wow! It looks like you have a lot of time invested in this project. You have much patience.

[BigV]

I started it OFF the handle, and then put it on the handle for more weaving and tightening.




Scooting it up the stems.




Levering it up over the tops of the wrap thongs with my fid.




Now I have the turk's head mostly in the right spot. I like the look of this knot with three passes. As the knot became fuller with more and more passes it became harder to thread the end of the lace through the knot. Here you can see the very end as I complete the last section that has only two passes with the third and final pass. I'll bury the end of this pass under the knot.

[BigV]

The next few shots show me opening up the space,




putting the end of the lace into the spot,




gripping it with my pliers




and tugging it through.

[BigV]

I needed to make this knot tight and neat. It is one continuous lace, and making it tight is kind of like tightening the laces on your hightop sneakers. You get a little bit of slack down by the toe, pull it up one eyelet at a time until you get to the top. I did the same here, picking an arbitrary piece in the middle-ish, tugging it out, pulling it through the next bight, and repeating the process many times. I was very careful to have the lace lie flat everywhere, no twists, and even tension throughout. Patience and neatness really count here.