An Afternoon with
Carolyn Baum
Flowers on a Wire
Thursday, June 24, 2021
Carolyn will share with us the process of how she creates her glass marigold flowers, made petal by petal on wire. Flowers have always been an important element in Carolyn’s beadwork. She says “I began encasing them, then applying them to the bead, but when I discovered working with wires, the flowers began to appear life size. Inserting the wires into each petal allowed them to become any size I wanted. It also allowed for intricate detail.
The flowers went from imaginary to life like when I entered the Lifeforms show in 2013. I struggled for many months to learn to make the flowers look real. I took flowers apart to study their structure, which helped with engineering the way to construct them out of glass.”
After the Demo Update!
(If you missed it, remember that members can watch the recorded demo on the Facebook Members’ Page, check it out! And if you aren’t a member but would like to be, visit the Membership page)
Carolyn Baum attended a two hour workshop at the S FL Museum in Bradenton around 1995, and hasn’t looked back. But it was a class at Corning Museum of Glass with Andrea Penzo that she credits with starting her journey toward her current love of making glass flowers. In the class, they made individual petals and leaves to create flowers, and then used them to make larger sculptural pieces. When Carolyn was back home, she tried to think what would be the best thing for her to make, and ended up out in her garden, looking at the marigolds. She took them apart to study the petals and their structure in order to make them as lifelike as possible, then set out to make them in glass. She was definitely successful!
We got to see the process of making a marigold flower with a leaf and bud from the beginning as she made petals, leaf parts, a sepal and buds. We watched as she took those components and created a beautiful marigold flower piece by piece until she had a flower with several petals surrounding a center – all sitting on a sepal – a leaf composed of several individual sections, and a bud with a hint of the leaves to come.
Once the flower was completed, we saw an entire marigold plant made from several flowers, leaves, and buds.
Carolyn shared her supply list for the marigold flowers, and several of us accepted her challenge to give them a try ourselves now. Perhaps we will be able to add a “participant gallery” here at some point with those efforts.
There were other even larger and more complex plants to see too, including a variety of types, each more lovely than the one before, as were other compositions Carolyn has created.. The firescreen is useful as well as beautiful, and her entry into wearable art at a GAS conference was amazing. What a feast for a glass lover’s eyes!
