Paper Tropical Flowers

While looking for Lego crafts I came across a video - it had nothing to do with Legos but popped up and caught my eye - on how to make a paper flower ball. I've made a few paper flowers (as you might recall, click here and here for a couple of them) but never any like this, so after practicing with a piece of white paper to make sure it was going to work and not waste my cardstock I moved on from looking at Lego crafts to making tropical flowers. The original idea made a round flower ball which takes 12 flowers, but I'm still dealing with tendonitis in my hand from moving furniture like a month ago, so I quit after making 4 flowers - I think they're very pretty even if I didn't make a ball!

Here's how:

Cut 4" paper squares, 5 per flower.

1. fold a square into a triangle

 2. fold the sides in to meet in the middle, creating a square shape

 3. unfold the side triangles you just made

 4. insert a finger into the side triangles and flatten them like in this next photo

5. fold the side tips down

6. fold the side triangles in half

 7. fold but don't crease the two edges to meet each other

 8. snip off the top tip

 9. glue the edges together to form the petal - I used glue dots

10. after making 5 petals, glue them all together to make a flower - note the glue dots didn't hold all the petals together so I switched to hot glue. Add something to the very center, I wanted to use sticky back Stampin' Up gem embellishments but couldn't get them to hold so switched to a mini pompom. The original inspiration video used pearls. 

11. glue however many flowers you want together in a bundle. I made a couple leaves following the above directions but didn't snip the tips off - seems more "leaf-like" to me - and glued them to the flowers before gluing the flowers into a bundle. 

I made a short video on how to fold the petals in case my description above doesn't make sense!



original source found here


one year ago: coincidentally it's a different paper flower.
two years ago: for real, it's another paper flower! I honestly had no idea and did not do this on purpose!
three years ago: rock photo stand. whew, 3 years of paper flowers woulda been super weird timing.