Flower Making Tutorial

At the end of June I'm giving some craft classes to teenagers as part of a summer school for learning English. Exciting! They'll get to learn the words 'scallop', 'distress' and 'emboss' before they've learned about irregular verbs!

I'll post more about the classes when the time comes, but for now, I'm in preparation mode. A key element of these classes is keeping the costs down - both for me and for the students. So I've decided to make a load of flowers instead of buying them. While I'm waiting for a special punch and emboss product to arrive on my doorstep, I'll settle for these steps:

1: Gather together your paper scraps.

2: Tool up!
3: Prepare the paper: let yourself loose on what you want your flowers to look like. You could use patterned, textured or plain old paper or cardstock:

You could stamp:

Or stamp and emboss:

You could emboss (with a Cuttlebug if you have one, you lucky people):


Or try out any other techniques: paint, glimmer, gloss, flock, distress, acetate...

4: Punch or cut flowers:

5: To achieve a look that is much more textured, much less flat, and much more attractive in general, use an embossing tool (if you have one) or the end of a thin paintbrush (if you don't) and do it by hand. For this technique I used a vellum flower:

With the end of a paintbrush, slowly work on each petal by moving the paintbrush in increasingly larger circles, pressing down quite firmly:

Then turn the flower over and repeat the motion in the centre:


If you like, give the flower extra 'plump' by curling the petals around the paintbrush:


And there you go - no more flatness:


I actually used the grouting lines of my tiled kitchen table for this pink flower to achieve a deeper fold:

6: Store flowers in a really neat box.


And OK, after an afternoon of work, the box is half-filled. Just how many flowers will teenagers want to use, anyhow? Hmmm...don't answer that. I don't want all my work to be in vain!