Cheap Orchid Plants

"These are an excellent medium; adding a little Spanish moss can improve the look and help with moisture retention."

The Art of Making a Silk Orchid Flower


Silk was first developed in China, where silkworms and mulberry trees lived naturally. To produce silk fabric, weavers must collect silkworm larvae, and first spin it, as almost any other natural fiber, then weave the fine threads.

Hand-Made Silk Flowers

This fine fabric, perhaps first woven 8,000 years ago, was originally reserved for the Chinese Imperial family. Just as they developed the first silk garments, they developed the first silk flowers. A ladys elegant costume might include a silk orchid flower, or some other type of bloom, tucked into her hair.

As knowledge of silk cultivation spread west, so did the art of making artificial flowers. By the 1100s, Italians were making these flowers, and they probably produced a silk orchid flower, among many other varieties.

Machine-Made Silk Flowers

Until this point, artificial flowers, like almost everything else, had been hand-made. But as Europe experienced the industrial revolution, they invented machines to help make more life-like silk plants.

The Powerhouse Museum of Sydney, Australia displays an excellent late-Victorian machine used to make artificial flowers. This little machine looks something like a small die press, but in fact, it was the culmination of Victorian flower-making technology.

A flower-maker would use dies in this press to cut flower petals out of silk or other fabric. He would have had many sets of dies to produce different species of flowers. Though a silk orchid flower may have only five or six petals, the next step, shaping the blossom, would take some patience.

Silk flower petals were then joined together using glue and wires. Then each petal was shaped with a warm soldiering iron and molds that fit the curvature of various flowers. The final step was dyeing and painting, which on some species of silk orchid flower, must have taken hours on each petal.

Today, artificial flowers usually do not contain any actual silk, unless they are very fine pieces of art. Other materials, like polyester, muslin, and satin are much easier and cheaper to work with. However, in a nod to the old art of artificial flower making, most blossoms are still referred to as silk flowers.

What was once exclusive, available only to the richest members of society, is now every where. Not only in arrangements, but also a silk orchid flower might make a nice, everlasting Mothers Day corsage or a decoration on a wedding dress.

"A dendrobium orchid can be found in a variety of natural habitats, ranging from high mountains to tropical forests and even deserts."