Thursday, October 20, 2011

Project DIY: How to Make Decorative Paper Flowers


Guest post by ftashion

Hello everyone in the Ruche big family, I'm Fang Ting from ftashion. Fresh flowers simply don’t survive at my place and that was my inspiration for making these paper flowers! They will stay pretty all year round!

Here’s how I made the lantern flower (left in the photo).

Materials:
1 polka dot paper (or any pretty paper will do)
1 green paper,
compass (to draw semi-circles),
floral tape,
1 long bamboo stick
basic stationery


Instructions:
Step 1 – 2: Measure and draw out the shape in the picture. It’s made up of one equilateral triangle (length of each side is 5 cm) and 3 semi-circles (radius is 2.5 cm). You can change the size of the triangle and semi-circles to your preference. It will alter the size of your lantern flower. Cut out the shape.

Step 3-4: Using the cut-out shape as the stencil, duplicate it 13 times. Cut all of 13 pieces out. You will have 14 pieces of the shape in all. 14 is not a magic number! In fact, you can play around with the number of the cut-out pieces and this will alter the shape of the lantern flower.

Step 5 – 6: Fold along the sides of the triangle. Paste one semi-circle to another and repeat until they form a ball. There is no one right way to stick them together, so have fun experimenting with the shape of the flower.


Step 7 – 8: Fold a small piece of green paper into half and draw a leaf on one side. Drawing a leafstalk will be helpful when attaching the leaf to the stick/stem later. Cut it out and when you open up the paper, you will get two leaves connected by the thin leafstalk in the centre.

Step 9 – 10: Place the stick on the leafstalk and then paste the two leaves together by folding them around the stick. TIP: Do not position the leaves too near the top end of the stick. The space should be bigger than your lantern flower. Wrap the stick with floral tape. Lastly, put the stick through the lantern flower and it’s completed!

3 comments:

Poppy and Pearl Co. said...

Great tutorial! : ) super cute.

Catmint said...

Those are really pretty!! It's also nice that they can look pretty from all angles, which is a thought that can sometimes be neglected when designing things.

decorative lanterns said...

It would add texture and interest. Really Guys, you are so creative. I love visiting your blog.