Playing with paper flowers...

In the January edition of Making magazine they interviewed the authors of the beautiful book Paper to Petal. It reminded me of all the pins I had accumulated of various paper flower projects but have yet to try out. I can't believe the transformation as paper is made into flowers - they look so beautiful and real. That book is most definitely on my wish list.

I have a ton of tissue and crepe paper at the moment from some decorations I made for my Mum's birthday, so it was the perfect time to try out a couple of different ideas I had stored up. It just meant I made gold flowers which doesn't necessarily reflect nature!

First up I had a go at this pretty rose from The Bride's Cafe, made from scalloped crepe paper. I found it to be the quickest of the three tutorials I tried and it would look gorgeous as a bouquet!

Next up I attempted to make a peony from a tutorial over at Freutcake. As you can see my flower does not resemble a peony. in. the. slightest! I still like it though but I think I need to work on my cupping and fluting techniques. I found a helpful guide over at Martha Stewart which goes through the different techniques of shaping crepe paper.

Next up I tried these paper flowers from Wedding Chicks. Whilst the other two types of flowers are made to be formed onto a wire, these have a flat bottom. It wasn't obvious from the instructions as to whether they had cut circles of the same size but I gradually increased the sizes of the circles as I added each layer. i really like how these turned out. These also worked great with tissue paper, they resulted in that pretty delicate pink flower in the picture.

A while back I was inspired by the D.I.Y. fresh flower ampersand on Paper & Stitch and I think I'm going to use these different flowers to create a word to decorate our home with...I just can't decide which word! Maybe Hope? or Love? Let me know if you have any suggestions!