Gum Paste Flower Tools

Gum paste flowers are absolutely beautiful, but extremely time consuming. In this lesson, I'm gonna share with you all of the different tools that you will need in order to move forward with any of the other gum paste classes. In this case, we're gonna talk about each individual item, why we need them, what they're used for and then we'll see a couple of handmade flowers. The first thing, when it comes to gum paste flowers is choosing the right gum paste. Now there are a lot of products out on the market that you can choose from. Everything from something that dries very quickly to something that actually takes hours to dry in order to be able to manipulate the leaves and work with them a little bit longer. They also would vary a little bit depending upon which style of environment you're in. So if you're in a really humid environment, you're gonna wanna pick a gum paste that's much dryer and dries faster, so that you have time to work with your flowers, but they will eventually dry. If you're in a very dry climate, you may wanna choose a gum paste that doesn't dry as quickly. So again, you still have some work time before those flowers start to harden on you and then you can't manipulate them any further. So find a gum paste that works best for you in your environment. I encourage you to try a few different products to make sure that you have what's working for you best, but don't get frustrated if you pick one that isn't quite right, just choose a different brand next time and see what you can do. There are also a number of gum paste recipes out there that you can try on your own to be able to adjust the ingredients in order to work for your environment as well. So if you're not finding one on the market that works well for you find a good gum paste recipe and try on your own, so that you can adjust those ingredients to work for you. The next thing that you're gonna need is a rolling pin and a type of cell board. Now a cell board is basically a board that's gonna help guide your process through working with gum paste. There are a variety on the market, so feel free to kind of look around and see what you can find. This is actually an acrylic cell board, it has a tiny little holes, and these are used for a couple of different things. First of all, it can be used in order just to size the right amount of gum paste for each leaf, or petal, that you're going to be creating. And it also has a use as a Mexican hat, which is where we basically create a cone underneath the flower that's tubular in order to support the rest of the petals of the flower. So this is the acrylic, it also comes in a very durable foam, so these have the same style of holes that you would find on the acrylic cell board, but this is definitely a less expensive option and more readily available in craft stores. And then there are different densities of foam available as well, so for instance, a firmer foam is going to be for thinning our petals and really creating a little bit of a more natural feel to the edge of the petals, where our softer foam is gonna be in order to curve and shape each of those petals to give them more of a cup shape. So having some different densities of foam on hand is helpful, but not a complete necessity. I'll show you how you can get around that. In some of the other classes, when we're working with individual gum paste flowers, probably the most expensive and the item that you're gonna have the most of when making a paste flowers, are gonna be your cutters and your silicone molds. And now they come in a variety of shapes and it really is gonna depend on which flower or leaf you're trying to create. They all are very customizable in the sense that most of our cutters also come with a mold that then sort of fits the cutter that you've chosen. For instance, this is a hydrangea cutter. It comes in two different sizes, one for a small and one for a large, but they use the same hydrangea mold and the molds are what's gonna give each of the flowers really that texture that a real natural flower would have. So all of those little indentations of grooves, the veining on leaves, that's why our silicone molds are so important to creating a more lifelike gum paste flower. Now, if you're just trying to go for more of a fantasy flower, rather than a true gum paste flower, you can actually utilize some of our other tools like our ball tools and veining tools that are a little bit more user-friendly in the sense that you can use them for multiple items rather than being very specific to just a hydrangea cutter and mold. These gum paste tools are just basic tools that you can then put your own veining into, petals and leaves, to create something a little bit more fantasy-like, but if you're trying to get a realistic petal, I really encourage you to seek out the right cutter and the right silicone mold, in order to make them as lifelike as possible. There are a variety of molds on the market, but most of them are a very flexible silicone. You can see they're very pliable and that's really so that when we are putting these two together, they usually come in pairs like this. But when we're putting two of them together, you get the texture on both sides of your gum paste. And it just really imprints and shapes each of these petals to be more lifelike. So definitely look for a mold that comes in a pair. Sometimes they're attached as this one is where it's the same process. You're just gonna push the two silicone pieces together. But in this case, I like it because you can't lose the second half, which is oftentimes something that happens. You just sort of misplace one and then you don't really have a whole lot of use for just a single. Other things that you may need are actually wiring. Now, not all gum paste flowers are wired. Some of them are actually just individual blossoms or individual petals that you will then use and place on your cake directly. If you're going to use a wire, please be sure to get a fabric or paper-covered wire. Don't use just a straight wire, if you can avoid that, that would be great. The reason I like these paper-covered wires is because they're already covered and the wire itself is protected. Never wanna stick a blank wire into a cake, oftentimes these wires are made of materials that are not considered, while they're certainly not edible, but they're also considered somewhat dangerous because of the corrosion that can happen when it's applied into something that has moisture. So please make sure you're using a paper-covered wire or even a fabric-covered wire. I find the paper is a little bit more user-friendly than the fabric itself, but please choose something that works best for you and something that you can find available to you in your area. What's nice also about the paper is just that now more often than not, we're either going to be using a white stem, a green stem or a brown stem, and you can actually find your wires in different colors as well. So I tend to have a variety of wire colors available to me, but if you can't find what you need, don't worry. There is of course, floral tape on the market as well, which you can then use to cover any of your individual wires. So if, for instance, you can't find paper or fabric-covered wire it's okay to use regular wire, just make sure that you're then taping them with floral tape in order to protect the wire from any of the food elements. You will also use a variety of floral tapes to assemble your flowers together, in a bouquet for instance. So these are basically a necessity, if you plan on doing any sugar flowers at all, you'll want a variety of floral tapes. Now there are a few different styles of tape on the market. There's also paper and the one that you wanna find is one that actually has a little bit of stretchiness to it, because what that does is it actually exposes the glue on the single side. So one side is very matte in finish and in texture, it doesn't have any adhesion properties, but when you stretch it and you can feel the glue sort of is activated when you stretch it. So you just wanna make sure that you're getting a floral tape that actually has more of a paper feel to it rather than a plastic, for instance, they have some plastic floral tapes out there that are nice and they're adhesive, but they don't stretch and so they become very bulky really quickly. One of the other items that I tend to use a lot is corn starch, as well as either an alcohol or even a piping gel and depending upon the flowers that I'm making, I may use alcohol for adhering different petals together and if there's a larger item that needs to be adhered, I might use a piping gel, so having those items on hand is very helpful, as well as corn starch, which we'll do to surf serve two purposes for you. One will prevent your gum paste from sticking to any of the boards, but I also tend to use it on my fingers a lot as well, because as we're working with our gum paste, it can become a little sticky. And just putting a little bit of powder on your hands, allows you to be able to touch those things without the gum paste stretching and moving in ways that you don't want it to. The last item is just a, this is just a pruning tool basically, this is gonna help us with bending our wires, curving them, transitioning them into things that are gonna sit within our gum paste flowers in order to be able to stabilize our gum paste. So having just a small pair of needle-nose pliers is my recommendation, smaller items for things like our wires, which we'll actually be bending into teeny, tiny, itty, bitty, little curls, depending upon the size of flower that we're using. So if you're making smaller flowers know that you'll be using a thinner lighter wire that is far more delicate to then something that is a bit more rigid and gonna stand up and hold much larger petals. In addition to that, some of your flowers may require a little bit more structure. So what I have here is just a foam ball, and you can certainly use gum paste, but that becomes very heavy, so oftentimes when we're creating something, that's a very large flower, like a rose, for instance, we may start with a foam ball on the end, in order to keep it nice and light so that all of our flowers don't become so heavy that we really have to worry about structure of our cake in order to support those, but it's also a little bit easier to work with and a little bit faster as well. So any little things that we can do to make our process go a little bit faster is something that I try really hard to do. So utilizing things like foam is one way to make the process go a little quicker and keep things a little lighter, so now that you have all of the information you need on things that you have to have or should have when working with gum paste flowers, I encourage you to go check out more videos on specific gum paste flowers, and how to create those, and also how to arrange them on your cakes.