Craftzilla!

So, as many of you know, the best part, for me, about this wedding planning has been that my love of crafting and making and doing has been renewed. Other than my wheel pottery class last year and my paintings that I did last year, I haven't done anything creative/crafty in a long time. It's been so awesome getting re-inspired by all these fantastic, crafty people who leave me in awe all the time!! Plus, it's gotten me excited about what I may/may not craft for our wedding.

A while back, I saw these paper flowers on Vintage Glam Blog, and fell in love with the idea of having paper flowers. A.P. was not really into this idea. He said, "I like real flowers." I told him I would make some sample ones and he could see how beautiful and cool and inventive these flowers could be. As you can see by the date on the original post, that was months ago. Finally, last week, I made the flowers as part of my (late) spring cleaning and massive efforts to re-organize this place. When I was all done making these suckers, I said to A.P., "See? Wouldn't these be lovely at our wedding?" He says, "Yeah, but I still like real flowers." Oh well. I think I'll still incorporate some of these (perhaps on the guest book table? Or as part of a centerpiece or something? I'm working on it...), but we'll have real flowers. For those of you who are interested, you can follow my directions below. Otherwise, check out the pics and behold my craftiness!

PS. I apologize for my lack of polaroid pics, but the size of this board was cutting off many, many photos.

PPS. I think even if A.P. had said he wanted these flowers, I'd have a hard time making all of them without help. It took me all night and the next afternoon to get all these done. But, I still want to incorporate some pretty paper crafts.

photos by me!

Paper Flowers w/Vase

What you need:

For flowers:

Craft paper
Scissors
Soft Lead Pencil (#2)
Floral Wire
Floral Tape
Jewelry Pliers
Glue

For container:

Craft Paper
Ribbon
Coffee Can
Glue
Modge Podge

Directions correspond to pictures, from left to right, row by row.

1. Gather together what papers you want to make your flowers out of. The original directions called for velum, I used pretty craft papers from Martha Stewart (on sale at Michael's for $2.99!).

2. Lay out your pretty paper and admire it. Isn't it beautiful? Yes. Figure out how many of each pattern you want. Some of my paper was double-sided, so I used 4 from each paper.

3. Using the stencil from the original directions found here, trace your circle on the back of your paper with a pencil.

4 & 5. Cut out the circles. Place them in pretty pile. Wish that you had a really big pile of pretty paper circles that you could roll around in. Imagine it raining pretty paper circles, water pretty paper flowers. Life's a crafty dream.

6. Fold the circles in half.

7. Fold the halves in half.

8. Fold the quarters in eighths.

9. Cut the tops of the folded circles so that they resemble petals.

10. Now grab your wire, and floral tape.

11. Have your cat help out. Zuzu Petals likes to craft, too!

12. Cut your wire into different length stems. At one end of the stem, using your jewelry pliers, create a small loop. Cover in floral tape. This is your stamen. Repeat for all your stems.

13. Now, go back to your petals. On the crease of one of the folds, make a small cut to the center point. Then, cut about 1/8 of an inch away from the opposite crease. You're basically creating a little tab that you will use when gluing the petal. You are cutting out a V. The part you cut out looks like a heart with a wing (I'm going to make a little mini banner out of these leftover hearts later). This part is tricky, and I think that Jeffery Rudell on CraftyStylish (where this project originally comes from) does a great job of illustrating the exact cut you need to make. Again, you can get his directions here.

14. Glue all your little petals, and crimp the petals to give the flowers some life. Rudell's instructions say to crimp the flowers outward, but I did them in all different ways. It gives them more dimension and makes them look like different flowers, especially since I used a variety of paper.

15. Poke the stem through the dried flowers, so that the stamen is in the middle. Cover the stem in floral tape. This is the hardest part, think. Floral tape is sticky and it took me forever to get it to stick to itself. Again, Rudell has good tricks to fix this in the comments here.

16 & 17. Now go make your vase. Take a used, cleaned coffee can (16) and some pretty paper in contrasting colors (17).

18. Wrap the coffee can in the paper. It's hard to iron out all the wrinkles, but do your best.

19. If you're like me, your paper doesn't wrap the whole way around.

20. So get some ribbon!

21. Put some glue down that paperless strip (that sounded dirty!).

22. Cut a strip of ribbon and glue it to that strip.

23 & 24. Put a loop of ribbon at the top and bottom of the can. Modge Podge the whole can and let it dry completely.

25. Put your flowers in your vase.

26 & 27. Arrange artfully on a shelf. I took some old glass jars I was saving and covered the lids in color coordinated papers. In the smallest jar I put some shells from a beach we camp on every year, and then I put the starfish in front. I also covered another can in some corresponding paper. In that can are some craft supplies. I'm going to add one more jar later with giant binder clips in it. Fun, fun!

Voila! Paper flowers! Last forever, and seriously spruce up my whole desk area! You could also skip the coffee can vase and do mason jars!

If any of you decide to take on this craft, let me know your results! I'd love to see other takes on this project!