To Mold a Calla Lily. Have ready a basin of hot soap suds, strong as possible of soap, and hot, so that your lily will be smooth, not lumpy or bubbly. Melt your wax by setting the tin cup in boiling water, as glue is melted. To every pound of white wax add a tube of Winsor & Newton’s flake white paint, dissolved and thoroughly mixed with one tablespoonful balsam fir, or Venetian turpentine, and half table spoonful of dissolved gum mastic, the whitest possible. This is a good recipe for sheeting wax for your own use, and will be given below in preparations for sheeted wax flowers.
Your liquid being thoroughly mixed in two cups, your white and yellow chrome cup, the yellow prepared exactly like the white, only yellow chrome paint substituted for the white tube paint; your molds all prepared by standing soaked in the hot soap suds, you commence with the yellow cup, dipping your spadix mold, or the center of the lily, in the yellow cup, making as many spadix as you wish to make lilies. After finishing dipping spadix, you take your white cup and large mold, dipping once and letting it cool a moment, and then immersing the second time, to give a double thickness to the heavy portions of the flower.
A hundred lilies can be molded in an hour.
The stems of wire can be prepared next. Fasten the spadix to the stem, and slip the stem through the hole at the bottom of the molded flower, then with a brush dipped in the hot green cup solder the whole together, spadix, stem and flower.
All molded flowers are made exactly alike. All tools dipped first in hot suds for every flower, after in the hot wax. It is well, as a rule, to make all white flowers first—afterward, the colored flowers.
All variegated flowers are painted with a brush, using Winsor & Newton’s moist water colors. All yellow flowers, like Thunbergia, spadix of lilies, etc., by dipping in the yellow cup. A scarlet cup for scarlet flowers, blue for blue flowers, rose colored for roses, Naples yellow for sofrano and tea rose tints.
All roses and double flowers are made of separate petals molded and joined together afterward.
All large leaves should be molded, and all small leaves, all dipped in the green cup.
Your green cup is made of all your refuse colors melted together, and the tube green tint added. Never use any darker tubes than No. 1 chrome green. Your olive and other tints are made by the refuse tints thrown in from the drippings of red, yellow, purple, and odd tints.
Directions for Sheeting Wax. To every pound of bleached wax, after dissolving thoroughly in an outer crucible of hot water, add 1 oz. balsam of fir, or Venetian turpentine, in which dissolve a little resin, white or mastic. If white wax is desired, one and one-half tube Winsor & Newton’s flake white paint should be added—yellow, orange or rose, and just what other tints are required. All sheeted wax by machine is first molded into square blocks or bricks, and the machine slices off the sheets. But these machines are expensive, and no lady cares to have one who only makes wax flowers for pleasure.