Paper Flowers

I love the idea of recycling.  Not just because it's good for the Earth, but because I love the idea that you can take something out of it's intended purpose and turn it into something completely different.  It reaffirms for me that change isn't always a bad thing and helps me remember that anything can be beautiful, even if it didn't start out that way.

A treasure trove of recycled paper tutorials is the website How About Orange.  Seriously, if you've got a few minutes, pop on over to her site and click the "DIY Tutorials" button on the top.  I'll wait...

I came across this tutorial a few days ago and have been making paper flowers ever since! These are fabulous because they require no special tools or techniques.  I used paper, scissors, a pencil and a thin knitting needle (although you could easily use a skewer or other thin stick).  I did also make a template for myself out of some old cracker boxes I'd been holding onto.  For the large flower I used a Cheez-It box and for the smaller one, a whole wheat saltines box was the perfect size.  Making the template was by far the most time consuming part of this project, but I knew I'd want to make several so it made sense for me.  If you just want to try one or two, use the printed pattern as your template and skip that step entirely.

For the first flower, I pulled out my trusty old issue of House Beautiful (Dec/Jan 2010).  It was love at first fold...

But then I wanted to try one with scrapbooking paper, too...  This paper is a little heavier than catalog or magazine pages, so it was a little easier to keep the edges curled, but not so heavy that it was hard to work with. 

Those are both the large size, so for the smaller ones I opted for catalog pages.  The first one was from the cover of Knit Pick's autumn yarns catalog (BTW, I highly recommend Knit Picks to anyone with any interest in knitting or crochet - they have amazing yarns at really affordable prices, plus tons of free or very inexpensive patterns).  This paper is very thin, so it was a little harder to score it without ripping through and you can see in the picture that the lines are very obvious, especially on the smallest set of petals.

And lastly, one from a Premier Jewelry catalog (my sister is a salesperson for them and I happened to have an older catalog kicking around - fashionable and affordable!).  I have to say that this paper is about the perfect weight for this project.  It's not quite as heavy as scrapbook paper, but thicker than catalog or magazine  pages typically are.  It was easy to cut, easy to fold and held the curls really well. 

  These flowers are currently decorating my Sharpie dish, you can see them in a few of the pictures, but I can imagine all kinds of lovely uses for them - wreaths, on gifts, strung together as a garland, even boutonnieres!