A Flower Tutorial

because every good scrapbook blog needs a few tutorials...

I love using flowers on pages, cards, my shirts. But they are kinda pricey. No? Get all those flowers and add them up. I'm pretty sure you've got my college tuition in there somewhere. Yea. So the best thing for me is to find flowers I can make. So I cruise through lots of tutorials, and try them out. Sometimes they work, but for the most part, I end up empty handed and with more paper in the trash. This flower came from me trying to make these. They just didn't work, so I sat for a real long time trying something out. & I got these!

What you will need
- 2 strips of 12x1/2" patterned paper (or cardstock, whichever is fine)
- one 2" width circle out of anything sturdy (I like to use the backs of my paper packs...recycle!)
- glue, preferably a faster drying one (but I still like my glue stick)
- glitter, shimmer, sparkles, whatever to make it shine!

so first:

these are the strips of paper.



Notice my rough edges, which are totally fine, since we are going to do this to them:

Scrunch them, roll them around in the palms of your hands. We need to distress them. Now if this looks like it's enough... it's not. Keep going!

O.k. this picture is a little better. What am I trying to show you? Well, if you look closely, you can see creases. We don't want that. We want to distress the paper enough so that it's sorta like fabric, where if you fold it, there's no crease, it just folds. Am I making sense? Well, just keep going! =)

Now, when those papers are distressed enough, we want to add some glue to our circle:

Darn it! You're gonna think I'm a liar. I said circle, and here I am with some rhombus looking thing... Well it still works =(

Now here comes the fun part. Starting at the outer edge of the circle (rhombus), start pleating the paper down. There is nothing perfect to this, You can pleat, scrunch, pound, drill (o.k. I kid), just get it on there in a spiral. You'll get to go around about 3 times. Like this:

See how it's sorta pleated and scrunched? Patience if it's not looking like this. It takes a lot of glue and nudging (this is why we distress so much, we are fighthing agaisnt papers natural straightness. Fight the system! too much? o.k. back to the tutorial) 

Now, the second to last step (woohoo!) Get your last strip and line up the edge with that inside edge of the flower. From the other end of the strip, roll it inwards, so that the design is rolled in. The roll needn't be so tight, we need wiggle room. Add lots more glue to the center of the flower. Now plop that roll into the center, edges touching, and genlty nudge it down. This may take some coaxing, and un-rolling. But you're going to squish it down. If things keeps popping out, just keep pushing it down, and don't worry about perfection. Your end result should look like this:

 I didn't really unravel this one. Well, not too much. Now, cut off the excess bottom piece so it's not sticking out. Get some leaves cut out (if you'd like) and have this:

Here's where you add some stickles or glitter to the edges. Or not. However you may choose. I hope this was helpful, or sensible, or at the very least entertaining.

Chao!