Whimsical Tissue Paper Flowers

             After taking a roadtrip for two weeks and returning home to begin immediately searching for a job (remember? My book store job closed, so sad! But life marches on) I have been swamped and unable to bring you any tutorials! I am now preparing for my very FIRST craft selling event (and it's for a great cause! Go check out the Toco Festival in Jellystone Park!) and I'm totally excited and TOTALLY scrambling to make sure my friend and I have enough items to sell. So, unfortunately I'm leaving you AGAIN without a tutorial. Instead I leave you with a fun concept and I'm sure all you crafty  whips out there can figure out where I am going with this ;) .

                  

Originally, I had a photo of the inspiration craft on here but I removed it because I did not have permission to use the photo, so to be safe I removed it. Sorry for any confusion!

  

My craft today is inspired by some browsing through Pinterest, where I found a wonderful tutorial on oversized, dreamy tissue paper flowers, and you can find the tutorial for them at Design Sponge. They are made by a company called Ruche, and they gave a great description on how to make them, but I wanted to make them for a window display and didn't want to get into chicken wire and cement (I tend to injure myself with chicken wire, and I get REAL messy with cement!). My budget was also...well, pretty much nothing. More or less, I had about $6 and whatever items I could find on hand. 

See? There's even a pile of junk sitting on the floor around my pretty flowers (and by junk I mean supplies I thought I might destroy to make more flowers!). 

To create my smaller scale version of those whimsical flowers:

For the flower stem:

Cut a piece of strong cardboard (I used a box that a shelf came in) into a slightly curved shape as "tall" as you want your flower to be. The flowers shown here are actually about 3 feet tall, and the curve just adds a bit of dimension to the shape. Then take either another piece of long cardboard or use poster board  (about 5 inches shorter than the curved piece) and bend into a "triangle" shape to add stability and dimension (You can see the straight line down the middle of the pink flower- this is the poster board). Hot glue that to the curved piece of cardboard, starting at the part that you will use as the top. 

Take a smaller piece of cardboard, about 5 inches in height by about 4-5 inches wide. Cut a slit in the bottom of the curved cardboard piece, and slide the 5x5 inside to use as a bottom stablizer (you may want to trim this to be wider at the bottom as a triangle shape to give a more natural flower stem shape). 

Take 2 toilet paper rolls as cut them in half. Then cut a piece of posterboard big enough to fit the curved board, the 5x5 board, and the now 4 pieces of toilet paper tube (one on each side of the stem). Hot glue this poster board to the bottom of everything, creating a base for the flower. Use heavy paper (I used tightly rolled newspaper) or another weighted agent and fill the toilet paper rolls. Make sure the rolls are also glued to the cardboard flower stem. 

For the Flower:

Cut a piece of poster board in an oval roughly the size of your hand (maybe a little bigger, depending on the flower size). Hot glue that to the top of the flower stem. This is now the base of your flower. Cut out large, tear drop shaped "petals" and hot glue them to the base as you desire. 

To finish it off:

Wrap the flower stem in green tissue, making sure to tuck loose tissue paper ends away if you can, then hot glue on  nice, big, loose leaves for added whimsy.