How to Make Paper Flowers or Ahoy, Daisies!

I promised my mother I would make paper flower centerpieces for my grandmother's 80th birthday extravaganza. I've made the giant pompoms before, so I thought it would be easy, peasy! And it was, except for the thing where I had to kind of readjust the recipe.

I started with two packs of rainbow tissue paper that I bought on amazon. And I thought I would just use my rotary cutter and cut the paper into 6" squares! Not so fast, Courtney! It was not easy at all! The paper doesn't stay together and you have to really push to get through the paper and be precise. Which made my edges shaggy.

Luckily I purchased two packs! One is enough for at least 60 flowers, with a bunch of squares left over. I never used the brown and used the black sparingly.

Once the paper was cut, I divided it into piles of colors. It was easier to group them by color family. The tissue paper is really hard to separate!

Barkley was a little upset I took his spot on the bed.

For each flower, I used six sheets of paper. If I added a middle, it was usually the seventh piece. And I just kinda played around with color. Also buy extra yellow paper. It seemed I never had enough yellow or white.

Here I did four sheets of light pink, two dark pink and a yellow band.

Stack them neatly, centering the yellow.

Fold like a fan and wrap the center with a pipe cleaner. The loop is around the middle and the stem comes down. If you reverse the pipe cleaner, and use a green paper instead of yellow, it will look like leaves.

Trim the ends. This one is rounded, but you can also do triangle ends, like a daisy, or cut four slits for fringe ends. I didn't really deviate from the three ends. There were so many colors, you don't need to go crazy.

Now gently pull the yellow to the center and scrunch it. Then, separate all the layers.

When I got the layers all puffy, I kind of grabbed the bottom in my fist and squished it upwards. That seemed to make the flower more round. I had some issues with the sides separating and the flowers looking more like fluffy bow ties.

I know there are a ton of tutorials for flowers out there, but they all seemed to come together magically and be perfect. And I found I had to do a bit more scrunching to get them to look amazing. Plus, I needed to use the most amazing pirate book ever. Which no one seems to mention...