April 8, 2008

HOW TO: Paper flowers

In the spirit of DIY and recycling I bring you a big ole pile of postcards (!) Remnants of the last Brooklyn Homeshow advertising that I could not just throw in the recycle bin. I mean - come on - postcards are expensive to print and the paper stock is just great for all sorts of things, right??
Things like what?!
And that got me thinking of all sorts of great projects to make. This project will use these postcards, some acrylic paint, a scissor and some ribbon to make paper flowers.

To begin a quick template on paper of a simple four petal flower shape, then used this shape to cut out many many flower from this nice heavy postcard stock.

Then I painted them red on one side and black on the other. This took several coats as the acrylic paint on the postcards was a bit streaky, so I did one coat in one direction and the next coat in a perpendicular direction to try and reduce one way streaking. I think you can see a little bit of it in that photo. After the paint was dry, you can take an awl to cut holes in the centers of the flowers, I used my handy leather punch.

And now we are all set for assembly! I thought they would make a nice special accent to my packaging. But you can make them into pins, string them together to make a lei, no limits! Here is a picture of the final product used as a nice special way to package my tee shirts.



















-Kimm
KimmChi.etsy.com

8 comments:

Joanne said...

nice idea!

Anonymous said...

Too cute! Great idea!

KimmChi said...

I HATE THROWING THINGS AWAY!!!
This was a fun use of those postcards. I should have some other fun tutorials with the postcards, so look out for them
-kimm

nina kuriloff said...

great ideas!
:)

make sure the flowers are totally dry before packing your tees.
;)

KimmChi said...

Ha ha! Good point Nina!

Anonymous said...

Thanks, that's a really great idea!

Arlene,
Tacoma florist

see steph sweat said...

looks so good!

cakehouse said...

kimm, those look *fantastic*. love it.

(i can't stand to throw anything out either...)