Crafting Passionz - Flower Swap 2

Here is the second part of the flower swap for the Crafting Passionz flower swap. Look to yesterday blog for the fabric flowers I created.


This part of the swap was a flower created from paper.


After a fair bit of experimenting and several failed attempted at paper flowers, I was almost ready to give up. 


The bulk of my problem was that I wasn't happy with the paper flowers I was cutting and trying to shape. They just weren't looking the way I wanted them to after I pushed, and prodded and shaped and glued. I decided the issue was that I didn't have a flower cutter that produced a flower in the shape or style that I was looking for. I did have some, but the end result just didn't look right after the techniques that I wanted to try... so it was either change the shape of the flower or change the technique. The conclusion was the technique stayed, the shape changed.


I pondered this for a bit until the light bulb finally went off. I have a Klic-N-Kut machine. I could download or create a flower style I was happy with and then go from there. This would also alleviate the issue of the flowers being cut the same as I could just repeat the cutting process as many times as I needed.


I created a flower shape I liked with seven petals. I then created various sizes of the same flower - 100%, 80%, 60%, 40%. At 100%, it was a little bit too big so I deleted this and added 70% & 50% to give me five different sizes for five different layers.


After some copying and rearranging I then placed my double sided paper on the carrier sheet and cut out all the petals I needed. Three 12" x 12" pages allowed me to cut all five layers for nine complete flowers.


I soaked each of the petals in water for 15 - 30 minutes, then placed them onto paper towels to dry. I sprayed them with a generous dose of spray starch before partly drying them using my heat tool to make sure there were no visible signs of water. 


Once each of the five layers was dried I started to curl the individual petals. I started with the largest flower and curled each petal around a bamboo skewer, then pulled the curl out slightly so that it wasn't too tight. Once all petals on each layer was curled, I dried the petal layer out completely before a final reshaping.


I repeated this with each layer, though made sure as the petals got smaller, the curls became tighter for the inside of the flower. 


When all layers were completed I nested each layer inside one another from largest up to the smallest using glue dots to hold them altogether.


Once all flowers were made, I sprayed them with Glimmer Mist for a little shimmer before finishing each flower off with a red rhinestone in the centre of the flower.

I think it looks a little like a water lily flower.