Paper Flowers: Worth the Work?

The latest decorative craze appears to be paper flowers. Sounds like a great idea, right? Decorate your walls with paper flowers that never die and work on your wall better than fake flowers. A flower with 6 large petals, 6 medium petals, and 6 small petals and a middle piece uses up 9 pieces of card stock paper. On Amazon, I bought a 5o sheet package of card stock paper for $8.05 plus taxes and am able to make 5 flowers, each flower costing around $1.60, which isn’t terrible.

I must admit the flowers being uses for permeant or temporary decorations can be quite nice, if you position them correctly on the wall. However there are some downsides to the flowers.

1. Time

Each flower can be very time consuming. The more you make the faster you can put them together. The first time I made these flowers was for a prom for disability kids, amazing cause and I wanted to volunteer my time. They said they needed help with decorations and once I got there I know why. It took me about 60 minutes to make one flower! Now that I’ve made about a gazillion of them, I can do it in 45 minutes. With all the cutting and glueing it is quite time consuming.

2. Hot Glue Gun

I must admit I’m not an expert with the hot glue gun. There is quite a bit of gluing and then folding that can cause you to burn yourself. While rolling the middle of the flower, I burned myself so bad. I had to hold my finger under cold water for 15 minutes and was in pain most of the day. So please, be careful while doing this.

3. Cutting and Paper waste

So much cutting!!! Pedal after pedal. I didn’t realize how much I hated cutting until I started making these flowers. Thinking I was an expert, I decided to make some for my daughter’s 6th birthday party to decorate the room, and my hands were killing me. Also, with the shapes of the petals, if you aren’t careful with placement you can end of up wasting a lot of paper.

4. Follow Instructions

It is very important to follow each otherwise you will cut something wrong or glue something wrong and waste time and paper.

5. Money

I mentioned above that every flower is about a 1.60 to make based on paper but there is also a cost of the hot glue. Depending on how many you need, you could easily end up with a $100 worth of paper flowers so plan accordingly.

Paper flowers are beautiful and a fun craft. You’ve now been warned.

Here’s how to make your own:

1. 9 8×11.5 Card Stock Paper (Colors of your choice)

2. Hot Glue Gun

3. Pencil

4. scissors

5. Petal Template

6. Optional-Add some nice colors to the center or petals with a little spray paint

1) Fold 6 pieces of paper in half. You should be able to cut 6 large petals on 3 sheets of paper, 6 medium petals on 3 sheets of paper and 6 small petals 2 sheets of paper.

Tip: Once folded in half you can cut 2 petals at the same time!

2) Using the Large Petal template, trace one petal and cut out a petal. You will need a total of 6 large petals.

3) Combine all of your petals and cut a 1/2 inch slit at the base of the petal.

4) Curl the petals away from your body. You can do this by folding the petals with your hand. Then overlap the flap and glue using your hot glue gun.

5) Glue all of the large flower petals together so the base of the petals forms a circle. It’s much easier to do this by using some of that extra paper to cut a square and glue the 6 petals around the square, leaving a circle in the middle. This only will work for the large petals and a base for the flowers (do not glue a square to the medium and small petal circle)

6) Repeat Steps 2-5 using the Medium petal template.

7) Attach your medium flower petal circle to the large flower petal circle using your hot glue gun. Then repeat with the small pedal circle

8) To make the center of the flower, you will take the remaining 1 pieces of paper and fold the sheet in half vertically. Cut the paper into 2 pieces. Then Fold vertically again.

9) Cut fringe on the vertically folded paper making sure that you cut from the folded side on both sheets.