Making very large paper flowers

At the start of the Easter school holidays, Missy Moo told me that for her holiday school homework, she had to make a big colourful paper flower. All the kids in her class were tasked with making large paper flowers for a spring display at school.

A browse through Pinterest drew us to Linda @ Craftaholics Anonymous's Rainbow Paper Dahlia Flowers. Linda has a great tutorial there for making these gorgeous paper dahlias. Missy Moo really liked the look of Linda's gorgeous paper blooms so we decided to try our hand at making flowers like these. We thought we might do them slightly differently from Linda - sort of like putting our own little spin on it. I thought you might like to see what we came up with so I took some photos as we went along to share our process with you.

So here's how ours turned out.

Here's another one we made.

We started with A4 coloured paper and cut our sheets into 4. So we ended up with A6 rectangles of coloured paper. Like Linda, we wanted to make three rings of different coloured petals. Our outermost ring of petals used between 16 to 18 A6 rectangles. Our second ring of petals used between 12 to 15 A6 rectangles of paper and the third ring used about 9 to 10 pieces of A6 rectangles. Incidentally, we also used some crepe paper but I will come on to that later.

For speed, I decided to staple my petal tubes instead of using glue. So here's what we did. Have a look at the sequence below please. Those black arrows in picture 1 are just for illustration purposes! You don't need to draw those on yours, ok? If you brought those two arrow-marked corners towards each other like I did in picture 2 and made a tube or cone with a pointy tip like I did in picture 3, you would be able to slide the stapler into the cone and stick a staple in there to hold the cone together (picture 4).

We stapled the bottom of each cone too.

We made up all the cones we needed. For the outermost ring of petals and the second one, the petal cones were left just as they were. For the third ring of petals, we needed the cones to be about an inch and half shorter. So we cut the ends off and stapled the bottom. You can see the three colours of petals in this next picture. Note that the cream cone has had the end cut off so it's shorter than the other two.

We now need to make the base for the flower. I cut a 6 inch diameter circle from some cardboard.

Here is another sequence of photos for you. In picture 1, you can see that I poked two holes into the cardboard circle. You really don't have to be very precise with these holes. Halfway between the middle and the edge will do. I then took a 6inch piece of pipecleaner and fed the ends into the holes like you can see in picture 2. Fix the ends with some glue and a bit of sticky tape (see picture 3). This little curve of fuzzy pipecleaner wire forms a hanging loop for hanging your flower up later. On the same side as the ends of the wire, mark out some circles roughly in pen. (See picture 4) I marked out a circle about an inch and a half in from the edge and a second circle roughly an inch inside the first one.

So we have our base and we have our three sets of petal cones. Now comes the part where we glue it all together. Ready? Ok. I have a cool melt glue gun ... And I also have a hot melt glue gun. I love both my glue guns equally. This part is a lot easier if you do have a glue gun. Missy Moo wasn't very confident using the glue gun so I did the gluing part whilst she stood by and handed me the petal cones one at a time. Using my glue gun, I stuck my first set of petal cones down along that first pen line I drew onto my base (picture 1) and just kept going all the way around (picture 2).

Then I glued in the second set of petal cones following that second pen line on my base. Each one of the second set of petals sits in between the petals from the first set.

Finally, I glued in the third set of petals. These are the stumpy ones that we had cut the ends off.

There was now a hole in the middle of our flower that needed filling. We cut a 3 inch wide by roughly 3 feet long piece of crepe paper. Our crepe paper was quite thin - almost like tissue paper. Missy Moo scrunched the crepe paper up like this ...

I then glued this along the edge of the cones so we got a frilled ring going all around the middle.

Missy Moo made a frilly disc for the middle of our flower. Here is how she did it - brace yourself for another sequence! She cut two A4 sheets of paper lengthways into thirds. So we had 6 strips. She folded each strip lengthways (1). She then carefully made small cuts just halfway down, all the way along the folded edge of each strip (2). When all the strips were cut, she rolled one of the strips up (3 and 4) and when she got to the end, joined another strip in with a bit of sticky tape. She just kept going until we got to the end of all 6 strips. This left us with a little crown like the one Missy Moo is holding in her hand (5).

We glued this flower crown into the middle of the crepe frilled circle to complete our paper flower.

There you have it - a gorgeous larger-than-your-head paper flower. You can make these in whatever colours take your fancy.

We thought they might make fabulous fascinators or fancy hats. Here is Missy Moo modelling our lovely flower which looks like it could be one of the amazing millinery creations that race goers might wear to 'Ladies Day' at the Royal Ascot races. What do you think?

We hope you've enjoyed this photo tutorial and will have a go at making your own giant paper flowers. Happy crafting, friends!