Paper Flowers

This week a movie is coming out called Paper Towns, based on a Young Adult novel about towns that may exist on the map – but don’t exist in the real world. Last week a friend mentioned something called a Paper Road, a road that exists on paper in the city planning department but never came to fruition. This friend is dealing such a road that actually runs right through her house.  The hope is to remove that road from city plans – so it never does become a reality.

Paper Flowers on the other hand are real things and I had the pleasure of taking a class with Robert Mahar on how to make some of these beauties.The first flower is very large and made from simple templates that we cut out ourselves.Staples and hot glue and the flower takes shape.The next stage was to make the stamens, which is basically a glorified Turkey frill, the instructions in this link are exactly how we made this much larger version.Here it the final flower, which of course can be made in many sizes.As you can see, this one is quite large.

Then we went on and made some smaller flowers, Robert used the Sillhouette Cameo to cut the template pieces. What a wonderful tool, but I’m not going full time into paper crafts; so it’s not something I will be buying anytime soon. For the occasional flower I’d like to make, I’ll cut it with scissors.The flowers are adorable, I learned a lot in this class. Simple things  like using the eraser side of a pencil while using the hot-glue gun. Any tip that helps avoid glue gun burns is a good thing!  Yes there are silicone finger caps that are more effective, but once again, I don’t use my glue gun all that much.A little more size comparison. When I got home I felt the flowers were missing something. I dove into my vast button collection and solved that problem. Of course I sent Robert my adaptation, he may use this idea in another class.

At home it was time to see what I could make on my own.The purple template is what Robert cut out on the Silhouette, I made the other templates by hand.Using a colorful $1 book I bought at the The Last Bookstore I set about cutting out the flower.No, it’s not as clean and perfect like the die cut flower, also, a lesson learned from quilting – a busy print will look very different from a solid color.For a first attempt I’m very happy, of course it takes practice to get better at this flower making craft.  Side by side, paper flowers can be very fun.