How to make tissue-paper flowers

Quite a few folks asked about the big tissue-paper flowers we had hanging from the ceiling during the Bunny Bash. They were homemade, and are easy to make once you know how. Each flower takes about five to eight minutes (depending on how speedy you are). Here are the instructions and a few tips I learned along the way:

Materials for each flower:
8 sheets of 20x30” tissue paper, thin wire, scissors, fishing line

Tip: Buy 20x30” sheets of tissue paper (like the size they sell at Target or Amazon.com). DO NOT try to make these flowers with the smaller 20x20” tissue paper that most stores sell (like Walmart, Michael’s, Diddams, and Party City) or your flowers will be misshapen, lopsided, and generally crappy looking and you will think that you are terrible at crafts and doing something wrong. (And you will have to beg your poor friend Maggie to get back in the car after already wasting an hour struggling with the small paper and drive to four more stores looking for bigger tissue paper, and then you will have to pour a glass of wine to relax before starting again.)

Alrighty, stack eight sheets of 20x30” tissue paper and fold the stack accordion style into 1.5” folds. Maggie and I found that it was fun to do some flowers all in one color, some in two colors, and some in three colors. The variety looked nice once they were hanging:

Cinch the middle together with a piece of wire (a twist tie will do in a pinch) and then twist the ends of the wire to make a loop for hanging.

Cut both ends of your tissue so the edges are rounded. (Any good pair of scissors we have in this house is immediately used in the garage or to cut chalk or dirt or something else unsavory, so our scissors are all dull and we had to basically saw through the paper. Whatever... it worked.)

Gently pull each piece of tissue paper away from the center. If you pull too hard the paper will rip, but you can repair any rips with a tiny piece of scotch tape. Everything is ok, just breathe, take a sip of wine, relax, and keep going:

Another rip? Where’s that damn tape?:

It’s best to hang the flowers immediately after fluffing them, or they’ll start to settle, plus your husband will be a little cranky that massive piles of tissue paper are covering every surface in your kitchen:

Don’t they look all purdy hanging up there? I used fishing line for the hanging, by the way:

I hung them at varying heights from all the recessed lighting cans in the kitchen and also from the center bar in the outside craft tent:

Also, this is one of the rejected flowers made from the too-small tissue paper. It was completely bare on one side and I just couldn’t get it to work, so I started to crunch it up and throw it away, then realized it didn’t look half bad when smooshed together and only seen from the top. So I jammed it in an Easter basket and called it done.

So there you have it. Tissue Paper Flowers.

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Post #27. A few people pointed out that even a post saying I’m not feeling well enough to post counts, which is good enough by me! So, for the record, yesterday’s “non-post” is going to be #26 and this is #27. Check out these other spring fling bloggers: And babies make four…, Another Journey, Birdie and the Queen Bee, Catherine’s Chatter, Diary of a Nouveau Soccer Mom, Dragonflies, Journey to Motherhood, Koprowski Kids, Life with L and M (julialaine.net), Love and a Little Craziness, Mindful of Mine, Moments with Maisie, No Ordinary Family, One Plus One Equals Four, Our Boy and His Cricket, Searching for Sophie, Spectacular S, Three Kids = Chaos, To Vietnam and China, We’re Here.