These are paper!

I love nothing more than fresh flowers greeting me at the door when I come home, but with the current heat wave they’re just not keeping. In fact, they’re dying at an alarming rate.

I’ve been dying (just like my flowers! ha!) to figure out how to make beautiful paper flowers to combat this problem. In fact, we posted a how-to on crepe paper flowers back in June.  So, when I found this how-to on Just Something I Made about making paper hydrangea buttons I got excited.  A starting point! The good news: expanding them to real-looking flowers looked really easy! The bad news: I had none of the supplies.

So I improvised with what I did have at home and it was a great success, if I don’t say so myself.

First things first: I had to cut my petals.  To achieve the delicate scallop of the hydrangea petal, I used a pair of wavy scrapbooking scissors I stole borrowed from my sister years ago and got to work on some spare reserves of tissue paper.  In order to cut quickly and create many at a time, I folded over the tissue paper in one-inch sections and cut that cross-wise into one inch squares.  I then used the scalloped scissors to round off the corners and voila! Stacks of petals.

Fold your paper over in one-inch sections.

Cut the paper into squares.

You'll wind up with a stack of square papers.

Round the edges with wavy scissors and voila! Petals!

Then, I needed a “stem” to stick the petals to.  Luckily, the boyfriend and I have discovered a love for bubbly Moscato and my eye fell on a small collection of corks growing on the kitchen counter. Perfect. Recycling at its best.

Using a pencil (sometimes a finger when the pencil wouldn’t push down hard enough) and a dot of glue, I began attaching the petals onto the cork.

Wrap the paper around the pencil and dot some glue on the bottom.

Start sticking it to that cork!

Once you’ve got it covered, start putting petals within petals and you’ll see the flower start to take shape.

Hello, "hydrangea!"

And then you’re done! In addition to two cork stems, I also affixed the paper to a flat disk of cardboard so that I could give the appearance of several more flowers in the vase.  Take a look at the final result!

They look awfully natural, don't they?! (You'll see I also put some white petals in the center of one flower.