Silk Flower Basic - part 1

Nature’s colorful decoration, the flower, has long fascinated mankind; so much so that many attempts have been made to duplicate its beauty. One of the first such attempts at duplication was a lotus flower made of painted linen, which was found in an Ancient Egyptian tomb. Other materials were used as well. In Ancient China, historians found flowers made from very thin, delicate slivers of wood, and they had been colored with tinted powders. But it was not until flowers began to be made from silk that mankind really came close to mimicking Nature’s originals.

In about the 12th century, flowers were being made by the Italians, who took the silk cocoons from silkworms, and shaped them into rosebuds and other flora, dyed them, and began selling them. From there, the art spread to France, where the flower makers worked on perfecting their techniques, the fabrics, and the final quality of the flowers. In fact, there is a story of a silk rosebud that was given to Marie Antoinette, who is said to have fainted when glimpsing its perfection. After the French Revolution, the skilled French flower makers fled their own country, and began to ply their trade in places such and England and America.

The Victorian era in England, while conservative in many ways, found its creative outlet in both living and faux flowers. Victorians loved colorful and vibrant decorations, in which flowers graced every surface imaginable, from fireplace mantles and dressing tables, to the lavish centerpieces of any dinner-party table, and faux flowers were made of such materials as satins, velvets, crepes and gauzes, and even porcelains and wax. The trend of artificial flowers could go nowhere but up, and in America, during the 19th century, some of the first larger-scale iron cutting tools were used to cut out the shapes of leaves and petals. It was perhaps during this time, or slightly later, when the term “artificial flower” came to be. And with its bright green, rubber stems, and wrongly colored petals, “artificial” they were! But not long afterward, the invention of plastic in the early 1900s caused a great boom in the world of artificial flowers. The polyester petals, leaves and stems, with better cutting and dying techniques, really began to resemble their living counterparts, and at a much more attainable price than the silk flowers of previous generations had been. And although artificial flowers today are no longer made of silk, they are still called “silk flowers” hearkening back to their earliest days.

Today, the best silk flowers are manufactured in Asia, with China being the largest supplier in the world. And flowers alone are not the only things referred to when speaking of “silk flowers.”  There is an abundance of other flora, such as foliage and decorative tree branches, as well as fruits and berries, long grasses, herbs and vegetables, and any other imitation of a living plant you could imagine.  If it doesn’t exist now, it certainly will soon.

Part 2 >>