Fade to grey

Blimey it's time consuming this photography lark. There's a dearth of flowers in the garden in December for flower Friday, I found the last few had been turned to brown slime by recent frosts.
I thought I'd found a really good skeleton of a leaf but it turned out to be a teabag escaped from the compost. Not very attractive.
Then I saw the fading hydrangeas belonging to our neighbour. I thought I'd better not steal a whole flower, though I'm tempted, so I just pinched off a little floret.
I tried it on a window ledge on a piece of white paper, all underexposed because of the white, ( yes that 18 % grey thing again ). Tried turning the exposure up or the av thingy as I call it, too much. Fiddled around with that for a while . Tried flash, too bright. Tried holding a bit of paper over the flash , no different. Folded it over into various thicknesses , couldn't get it right. Decided to put the flower onto a piece of pink card to turn down the dazzle factor a bit. Tried it with and without flash ,a torch , shallow dof deep dof etc etc. All permutations. Was horrified to see an hour had passed since I started on my quick flower blip, so called it a day and this is about the best of the bunch, although LooseCanon says he ' can't tell what it is'! Grrr. I give up.
At least I was sitting inside in the warm, he is currently trying to take photos of birds in the garden , whilst hiding behind the washing pretending to be a pair of jeans. It doesn't appear to be fooling them so far and he looks pretty cold.