Pretty Paper Flowers

I'm in the process of prettifying my house, but I absolutely fail when it comes to keeping plants alive! So I decided to look into crafty alternatives. After some gathering of inspiration photos - I looove to do this! - I got hold of some florists wire and florists tape and made myself a flower arrangement!

What do you think? It's based on this tutorial at Etsy. The flowers are made with vellum paper that I bought at Eckersley's years ago (yup, I held onto it that long before I decided on the right project to use it in!) and the leaves are made with pearly scrapbooking paper. It's only single sided, so I glued two sides together. Then I was lazy and taped the leaves onto their stems, lol! You should probably glue them on or put it in between the two pieces of paper instead.

Photo without flash - gives a better indication of
what they really look like. My hand's a bit unsteady
so it's a little blurry.

Photo with flash - shows the folds clearly, but in
reality the fold lines aren't that obvious.

The stems for the flowers and leaves are florists wire covered in florists tape - it's the first time I've used either and it was GREAT fun! I only bought a little bit of wire though and I ran out after this. I'm definitely going to get some more!

I had a go at making some tissue and crepe paper roses. They worked out OK! They're very rough, and don't have stems yet since I ran out of wire ;) but now I know how so next time I'll be able to make awesome ones.

It was quite therapeutic tearing the paper into strips and rolling it all up :)

I think these would look nice as part of a bigger floral arrangement, not so much on their own though.

This shows the flowers' sizes.

I've since found photos of Martha Stewart's crepe paper flower kits which look WAY prettier than these things! I'm faaar too scabby to buy a kit, but when I get some more florists wire I think I might see if I can replicate some of her ideas! Especially the daffodils and dogwoods <3

Aren't they beautiful?

Finally, I made some more pretty flowers out of scrapbooking paper and buttons :) These were easy too! The hardest part was deciding on what papers to use!! I'm pretty happy with how they turned out, but I still need to add stems and leaves.

I used two types of pearly, damask patterned papers and four others - two blue, one green and one pale caramel with writing all over it.

I used coordinating buttons in the middle - pale blue, green and tan. I think these would look awesome with more decorative buttons, but for a first try these are pretty cute!

To make them all I did was sketch out three templates - a big five petalled flower shape, a smaller template of the same shape and a small eight petalled flower shape for the centre. From different papers, at least three coordinating papers will work well, cut out one of each pattern for every flower you're going to make. I did five :) Then, squeeze each petal for the first two templates in half to give them a 3D effect, and for the eight petalled flower roll each petal up tightly then pull it back out, so they stay slightly curled at the ends. Stick the petals together with double sided tape and glue a button in the middle.

Viola! Flowers that will never wilt :)

I'm going to make some fabric flowers as well, so I will share my adventures with that and the Martha inspired crepe paper flowers soon!