You Will Love Making Paper Flowers
Kids Will Love Making Paper Flowers
Making paper flowers is almost therapeutic. It's so relaxing, fun and always puts a smile on everyone's face. This is almost the perfect project for a gang of young children. Get them learning the basics and start a little production line.
Then enjoy the results for months and years.
Making paper flowers is not as difficult as it looks. I have made paper flowers for decades and still love making them now. Create some wonderful, happy memories with your little ones or just make these for yourself.
What we need to make paper flowers?
- Yellow tissue paper
- Plastic drinking straw or thin wire
- Sticky tape
- Crepe paper, pink, blue and green
- Scissors
Start Making The Centre Of The Tissue Paper Flower
Step One
First we want to make the pretty yellow details in the centre of the flower. Remember, it doesn't have to be yellow, you can actually do any colours you like.
Cut a long strip of yellow tissue paper. Make it about 6cms wide or 2 and a half inches wide.
Now simply snip along the edge at equal distances to make a fringe. Cut most of the way across, but not all the way. So one end can hold all the fringes in place.
If you are more confident, you can fold the tissue paper in half and then in half again. Then cut the fringes. This means you will be cutting through many layers of tissue at once. This is more fiddly, but does speed the process up.
Isn't making paper flowers fun?
Start Wrapping The Paper Flower Centre
Step Two
Now we get the drinking straw or wooden skewer or thin wire and we are going to start wrapping the tissue paper around the end. We want our new frilly bit to be sticking out the end of the stick or straw. This is the first part of making paper flowers.
Once the tissue paper is wrapped around our support, we can tape it down to the end to hold it in place. Overlap the sticky tape over the tissue paper and the stick, to hold it in place.
If you need more flower centre pieces, you can just repeat the process. If you have too many, just cut some off before taping.
Make The Crepe Paper Petals
Step Three
Now we need some petal shapes.
Cut petal shapes, like above, from the crepe paper. Crepe paper has a sort of grain to it. You will notice crepe paper is more stretchy in one direction, than it is in the opposite direction.
Take an offcut of crepe paper and try and stretch it one way. Then turn it 90 degrees and see how stretchy it is in that direction.
Ideally, when we are making paper flowers, we want our petals to be stretchy width ways. So we can stretch a little curve into them. But honestly it is not critical if you cut your crepe paper the wrong direction.
Start Assembling The Paper Flowers
Step Four
Now we need to build up our petals, like a real flower. Wrap our yellow frilly centre with a petal and tape it in place. Then move around and add another petal. Keep going until you have as many petals as you feel looks nice.
When you are making paper flowers, you can simply make variations in sizes and colours and shapes to create something unique to you.
Also remember, your first flower won't be the best flower you ever make. So don't worry if you are finding it a bit fiddly. The next flower will be easier. Then the next will be even easier.
Learning can take some time, so be patient and don't be afraid to make a few mistakes. Making mistakes is ok. We can just get another piece of crepe paper.
Complete The Stalk Of The Paper Flower
Step Five
Now we have our petals in place, we need to make the green stalk.
Cut a strip of green crepe paper. Tape it in place at the top of the stem and the bottom of the flower. Slowly and carefully start twisting the stem and wrapping the green crepe paper around the stem.
Slowly move down to cover the stem and fix the end in place.
The Final Step of Making Paper Flowers
Finally, we can shape our crepe paper petals a little. If you cut your crepe paper the right way you can push your thumbs into the centre of each petal and stretch the paper a little.
This will produce a sort of bulge in the paper. If you did it the right way, this bulge can look like the curve a real petal has.
But really, if you did it wrong, it does not matter. No two flowers ever look the same, so your don't have to either and we can just practise again on the next one.
It is interesting to have paper flowers that look like they are at different stages of opening. So not all need the extra petal shaping anyway.
And there you have it. What a lovely gift and such a relaxing hobby. If you are expert at making paper flowers, literally everyone will always love you and the joy you bring to their lives.
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