How To Make Paper Flowers

Good evening. I hope this post finds you all well.

Today, I have a step by step tutorial on making paper flowers which can be used to decorate your party table, your home or given as a gift. It uses origami techniques and is fairly simple to do. If you use your search engine and look for "origami flowers" you'll find lots of pages with different types of flowers but I really like this variety.

You can make these flowers different sizes. I've made two sizes which use 3 inch and 4 inch squares of paper. I used plain colours for these flowers but patterned paper would look lovely too. So to start, cut your paper into the size of squares you want to use. You will need 5 for each flower (I used 6 on one of the smaller flowers).

Next fold the square in half diagonally.

Now fold the corners up to the centre. Do this on both sides.

 Ok, so all very simple so far. Now you need to fold these flaps down so that the edges line up.

Now this next bit is a little bit trickier. You need to open up the flaps slightly and flatten them out.

Ok, hopefully you got that bit. Your paper should now look like the one above. The next step is to fold down those little triangle flaps at the top of your flower.

My personal preference at this stage is to reverse these flaps and fold them inwards but you don't have to. I'll show what it looks like if you do though.

Ok, so next you need to use the little fold line on each side and fold in the edges as shown.

Still with me? The next bit is to make this folded paper into a petal. I started using a glue stick which works quite well but you need to hold the petal until the glues dries. You could also use PVA glue but only use a small amount and again hold until it dries. If  you have a glue gun this is the easiest and quickest option. Before glueing together, I like to fold the petal into shape as I find it makes it easier to handle once glue is applied.

Apply glue onto one side of the petal, and then fold each side together and hold until glue is set.

And that's your first petal made. Now you need to do it all over again for the other 4 petals! It does get easier each time and before you know it, you'll be as fast as lightning!
So now you've made all 5 petals you need to assemble them into a flower. Apply a small amount of glue on the inner edge of the petal. My photographer had gone up to her bed so I don't have a photo of this stage but I have marked where to add glue in the photo below.

Carefully place a second petal along this line. You don't want the petals too close on the outer edge, which is why you only need a thin line of glue.

Repeat this step for all 5 five petals to make your flower.
I used buttons as centres for my flowers but you could use gems, beads or pom poms. Apply these with either a glue gun or PVA glue. For stems you could use florist wire or pipe cleaners. The first time I made one of these was at about 10 o'clock at night and the only thing I could find was a garden stick (the kind you use to keep your tomato plants straight) so that's what I used. I decided afterwards that it would make a great footpath marker! I think shorter sticks or wooden kebab skewers would work too as the flowers are really quite heavy. For this bouquet I used florist wire which I secured with the glue gun and then wrapped florist tape around the bottom of the flower to neaten it all up (I secured this with glue too as the tape wouldn't stick to the paper).
I wrapped oasis in tissue paper and pushed it into a clean jam jar to display my bouquet.

And here's the final bouquet. This one is green, brown and yellow as it's going to be used at my son's Jungle birthday party but obviously you can use whatever colours you like.
I hope you find this tutorial useful and if you have a go at making some flowers I'd love to see them - drop me a line at ardacards@gmail.com.
Good night  (I'm off to snuggle up under a blanket to keep warm, brrrr!!)
Take care
Suz x