diy paper flower favor kit tutorial (my mini workshop recap)

First, I just want to say thank you to everyone who came out to Creative Bag's Toronto store on the weekend to see me. I know that many of you drove into the city from the north, east and west! I had a wonderful time and we will be doing more of these going forward. I loved sharing my ideas with you and telling you about so many of the great products that we have in the store (and some that are on their way!). If you have any suggestions for future events - please leave me a comment here on the blog or send me an email here. I'd love to hear what you have to say!!!

We had a great turnout for the paper flower mini workshop and many of you purchased the "diy paper flower favor kit" that I created to make at home. As promised, here is a quick tutorial to remind you how to make the flowers and put together the favor box.

In the kit you would have received a copy of my instructions (see above), a round favor box with lid, a strip of rhinestones (diamond wrap), two pieces of tulle, and paper shapes - one large scallop circle, three medium circles, two flowers and one leaf. In the next post I will give you all of the information regarding the tools that I used to cut these paper elements so that you can make more of these favor boxes for a wedding or party.

You will also need: scissors, two sided tape or glue dots, glue or gel medium and a water mister.

The first thing that you want to do is give the two flower shapes some texture and dimension.

Start by using a water mister to spray one paper flower. A light mist of water is all you need ... just enough so the paper will be easy to work with. Next, scrunch the paper flower into a ball with your hand! I know that I surprised many people when I did this at the workshop. It will look similar to the photo second from the right. Then you want to gently open the paper back up so that you can see the petals again. Play with it so that you give the flower a more dimensional look. You can see the difference between a flower that has been scrunched and one that has not in the first picture on left. Do this to both paper flower shapes and set them aside to dry.

Now we will use the scalloped circle shape to make the next flower part. First you will need to cut the circle into a spiral shape as you see in the first two pictures on the left. Mist the paper with your water mister as we did earlier with the flower shapes. Starting in the centre of the circle, create a cone shape using the end of the paper and start rolling the paper tightly together until you get to the opposite end of the paper spiral ... see the second picture from the right. Set the paper down on your work surface and it will open up a bit ... if it is too tight you can play with it to open up a bit or if it is too big you can rewind it again to make it a little tigher. Set it aside and let it dry.

You will do the same technique on the three vintage text paper circles.

I posted a rolled paper flower tutorial using circle shapes on my blog a while ago and you can also check it out if you want. Basically, the plain circles will create rolled flowers with a straight edge ... the scallop circle will create rolled flowers with a scallop edge on a few of the outside layers of the flower.

{Note: I drew a spiral on the circle so that you could get a better idea of what I mean when I say cut a spiral shape. If you want to use a pencil to draw your lines before you cut that is okay ... or just do as I do and cut away! You don't have to be perfect.}

To attach the rhinestones to the top of your favor box you will need to use two-sided tape or glue dots. As you can see in the photos above, I used a single length of two sided tape and adhered it to the middle of the rhinestone strip. Then I attached the rhinestones to the box top as shown. You can do this step before or after you have attached the flowers to the top of the box ... I decided to let the flowers dry while I was photographing this tutorial and did this step while I was waiting.

The last thing to do is assemble the flowers on top of the favor box top.

Please note that I am a mixed media artist and gel medium is my adhesive of choice. You could you could easily use white glue, mod podge or a hot glue gun on these last steps.

First you will want to adhere your two flower shapes together as in the top left picture.

Then you will add a generous amount of gel medium to the bottom of the scallop circle flower and place it on top of the first two flowers to form one large flower.

Use gel medium to attach this large flower to the box top as shown in the top right photo.

You will want to use the gel medium again to adhere the three vintage flowers beside the larger flower ... as you will see in the bottom left photo, I angled the flowers so that they were not all facing up.

The last step is to adhere the two small pieces of tulle into the arrangement. I think that the tulle is a fun, unexpected element and where you put them isn't important ... just tuck them into two spots that look a little more open and make sure that the two pieces of tulle are not side by side. I simply folded the tulle in half twice and added a bit of gel medium to the folded corner. You can use a pencil or wooden stick to position the tulle into place.

The leaf can be used as a gift tag or escort card. In the kits I used paper that had a design on one side only so that you could easily write on the back. The leaf does not have to be glued to the favor top ... it will easily slip into place under the larger flower so that it can be removed.

As I said earlier, my next post will be about how to use the die cutter and paper punches to cut your own papers if you want to make a bunch of these yourself. There are still a few kits in the Toronto store if you want to purchase a kit ... they are $5 each.

Please leave me a comment with your opinion/ideas on mini workshops and demos. I'd love to hear from you whether you were able to attend or not.