Home-made Flower Tutorial

Okay, so I've seen many others do a "tutorial" on their blog. I've been making these awesome home-made flower for a while and they are so easy and versatile that I will likely never buy a flower punch. So, I decided to share the technique with you by making my first tutorial. Here is how you do it: First, you punch a circle out of some beautiful designer paper. I've used my 1 1/4" punch here but you could use any size, or use your coluzzle, or even cut your circle "free hand". As long as it is close to a circle, it doesn't have to be "perfect"! I am using some red desinger paper scraps that I've had around for a long time! I'm always looking for ways to use up those scraps. Next, take a pair of scissors and snip 5 cuts in toward the center of the circle making sure you space the snips evenly around the circle and don't cut all the way through, leave a flower "center". These will make the 5 "petals" so it is important to make 5 snips. If you end up with 4 snips, no big deal, your flower will just have 4 "petals" but we know that nature tends to follow the "odd" rule so most flowers have odd number of petals and odd numbers tend to be more attractive to the eye. So, finish your 4 petaled flower for practice and try a 5 petal flower next time. These are easy, you'll want to make tons of them !! Okay, the next step is where practice will help. Take your scissors and trim off the "corners" from each "petal" going in one direction - so, for example, here I've trimmed off all the left hand corners of my petals. Next step, you probably could guess, trim off the other "corner" from each petal making it more rounded looking. This is why it doesn't matter whether your original circle is perfect or not because in this trimming step, you can straighten up any crooked parts or ... as I sometimes like to do, make the straight parts look more crooked! It certainly gives a more whimsical flower. Anyway, for the card I was making, I wanted more straight flowers, but have fun with it! Once you get all of the trimming done, you can tidy up any specific petals that don't look quite right. And voila, home-made flowers that you can use in a number of ways. Some of the things you might think about doing is layering them on a card, adding stickles in the middles, adding buttons in the middle, clustering them on a card or scrapbook page, using them as a "topper" to a homemade box or bag, using them on a tag, layering different sizes, anything! You are really just limited by your imagination. I have used them in the past on this card (they are the brown flowers behind the white primas), on this card, and also on this card that I made for a CPS challenge. Here is a card I made for the October 19th Mini VSN challenge Abundant Supplies hosted by BeadFreak22 (or Katherine). She asked us to create a card using at least: 2 stamped images, 4 layers, 6 colors, and 8 embellishments. Well, I'm good on the images (there are actually 3), the layers (I have 4 on there), the colors (there are exactly 6), but I am not so sure about the embellishments. In the chat thread, Katherine indicated that you don't have to use 8 different items as embellishments just 8, and indicated that you could use 4 mini brads and be half-way there. So, I am hoping that the 22 beads that are in the middle of the flowers can be considered as at least 8 embellishments!! Regardless, making this card was a ton of fun!! Supplies: Cardstock all SU (Whisper White, Close to Cocoa, So Saffron), Designer paper is Anna Griffin, Stamps (Warmest Regards, Linen, Anna Griffin swirl), Ink is Close to Cocoa (SU), beads (Countess), Crystal Effects (SU). So, now it is your turn!! Try making some of those wiggity, wiggity wack flowers (that means cool by the way.... my son's favorite term these days!) and give me a link so I can check them out!! Have fun! Thanks for stopping by to visit. See you next week.