Salaric

Dad’s been moping about his Welsh ancestory lately so I thought I’d better cheer him up. I decided we would celebrate St David’s day on the 1st of March as he is the patron Saint of Wales. The symbols of Wales are daffodils and leeks due to some historical battle and I’d picked up a foam kit in the Pound Shop in Gloucestershire. This kit makes daffodils in a vase.

I started by constructing the blue vase; this came as six foam shapes but was actually very tricky to push together as some of the shapes where just slightly misaligned. Eventually I got there and it is a simple and pleasing shape.

The kit comes with foam heart sitckers in two sizes which I then stuck onto the sides of the vase in a horizontal line.

Then came the making of the flowers; this was actually incredibly easy.

First off all I found there were three different foam shapes that made up the flowers, plus a leaf shape. The outer petals, a middle piece that was like a serrated disc, and a long rectangle that had a hole in one end and a rounded off corner at the other.

I pushed the outer petals onto the green fluffy pipe cleaner.

I then slipped on the middle foam ‘disk’ and pushed the pipe cleaner through the hole in one of the long rectangles of foam. I pushed enough pipe cleaner through so that I could bend it over and twist the pipe cleaner to itself underneath the foam shape.

I then rolled the foam rectangle around the twisted pipe cleaner centre forming the ‘trumpet’ part of the daffodil.

I then moved the foam disk up the pipe cleaner and slid it over the bottom of the rolled up tube of foam – this holds the ‘trumpet’ of the daffodil in place.

I then moved the outer petals up so that they came up over where the pipe cleaner twists onto itself and so that it was flat against the back of the other two parts of the flower. The double thickness of pipe cleaner helps it all to stay in place.

I then threaded on the foam leaves. These had two holes in them to help the leaves sit nicely on the pipe cleaner, however during the first attempt I made at this I put the leaf on upside down :/

To finish the flowers I bent the pipe cleaner so that the head of the flower part was at a right angle to the stem.

I made all of the flowers with different colour combinations as there was orange, white and yellow foam flower shapes. I then placed the whole lot in the vase and presented it to my dad 🙂 This was easy to do and I’m going to get my scouts to make daffodils in a similar way.