Tuesday Tutorial: Paper Flowers

 
Hi everyone!! It's Amy here today, and I'm so excited to be bringing you the very first installment of October Afternoon's new series :: Tuesday Tutorials! Each Tuesday the Design Team will bring you a fresh, fun tutorial specially designed for your favorite October Afternoon projects. Today I'm going to show you how to create super easy flowers out of something we all have, scraps and a circle punch, and adhesive!
 
I wanted to show you that there are many options with these flowers, so I created 3 different sizes. So for which ever sized circle punch you have, you can create these fun, easy flowers for any of your paper crafting projects!
 
To achieve this I used 3 different sized circle cutters to create 3 different sized flowers. Today I'll be using my 1.5" circle punch to demonstrate. On my layout above my 2" circle cutter resulted in a 4" flower, my 1.5" circle cutter resulted in a 3" flower and my 1" circle cutter resulted in a 2" flower.
 
First, start out by punching out 7 circles, 6 for the petals and one for the adhesive. (Note, on some of my flowers I found that using 8 petals worked best, but for this size 6 seems to work out just right.)
 
Next we are going to do our folding. The object is to create a "V" shape from your circle. Don't worry about being perfect, you just want to make sure that you aren't overlapping at the tip of your "V" or your petal may become to small, and you'll need to add more.
 
Repeat this same folding technique on all 6 circles. I like swap sides of the patterned paper, it varies the pattern and creates a fun whimsical feel. But you can also keep all the paper the same direction for all the petals, it's up to you!
 
Next up, you're going to cover your last punched circle in a sticky adhesive. This is especially important if you don't plan on sewing your flower together or stapling the center. I use an ATG glue gun, and that has very tacky glue, so that works fine.
 
When you're done adhering, this is what your flower will look like. Now, you can totally wrap up this project here, simply by covering the center with a button or other embellishment, or you can take it one step further, which I often do, by stitching around the perimeter of your flower.
 
I really like a messy, whimsical look to my freeform stitching, so there really isn't a right or wrong way to do this. I just follow the curve of the circle several time, until I think it's done.
 
When you're done stitching, it will look something like this. Now, to give your flower dimension. Simply stick your finger inside each petal and slightly squish the sides together. Be careful not to squish too hard as to fold the back piece, but just enough to add a roundness to each petal.
 
In the end it will look like this! Now, this is where I dressed up my flower by distress inking the edges and adding embellishments to the center of my flower.
 
Here you can see, I added cut and punched pieces of patterned paper, as well as buttons and tin caps for the centers of my flowers. Super fun and super easy! Gotta love that! I hope you try this whimsical way to add easy flowers to your cards, layouts or altered paper crafting!

Thanks so much for stopping by October Afternoon today! Have a wonderful day! ;)