Crazy Flower Project

I mentioned in a previous blog post that in decorating our new house, I had decided to embrace the fact that Sam and I love bold color and pattern. Our bedroom was already pretty bright with bold blue, yellow, white and teal bed spread and pillows. But then I saw a project on Pinterest that intrigued me. It was such an inexpensive idea that I thought, "Well, if I do it and Sam or I hate it, it won't have been a lot of money wasted."

The idea was to create enormous paper dahlias to hang on the wall above our bed. Here's how it turned out:

WHY ARE THESE PHOTOS SO BLURRY?!?!?

I bought colorful card stock paper at the craft store and did my best. The concept is really simple. You start with a cardboard circle- the bigger the circle, the bigger the flower. I did two 8-inch circles, and three 6- inch circles. The next step is to cut squares of colored paper. You need a LOT of squares. For each flower, I probably used about 60 or so squares. In the beginning (big blue dahlia), I used the same size squares for the entire flower. But as the project went on and I got a little better at making the flowers, I ended up varying the size of the squares. With the pink one, I started with six inch squares on the outside, then used 5 inch squares for most of the flower and 3 and 4 inch squares for the very center. It's definitely the best-looking flower, so if you do this yourself, take my advice and use a range of sizes on the squares.

Anyway, I'm sure you could figure this out on your own, but once you have the squares cut, you just glue them into a cone shape and then glue the cone to the cardboard circle. Start on the outside and work your way in. I used Elmer's glue on the first flower and it took FOREVER. The rest of the flowers I used hot glue and it went a LOT faster. I probably used an entire package of glue sticks from start to finish. If you want a more detailed description of how to do this, there are plenty of tutorials on Pinterest. Just search for "Giant Paper Dahlia DIY" and you'll see a bunch. People have done it with vintage music paper or paper torn out of old books, or newsprint. I liked the idea of a colorful display, and I liked the idea of card stock because I thought it would hold up nicely. The leaves I added were just leaves from the craft store. I'm not in love with them. I wish I'd chosen ones that were a little fuller, more lush, but I don't hate them enough to start over. I used Command strips to hang these up. Each flower took about an hour of cutting, rolling and glueing, done mostly while watching TV or listening to a podcast. And as for the ombre color of each flower, that happened mostly because the card stock is sold in packages that have a bunch of shades of the same color- I bought a package of blue/teal, a package of pink and a package of yellow.

I don't know what my next project will be, but I'm leaning towards doing a bathroom make-over. Not a huge remodel, but I think a coat of paint and some cute accessories could go a long way to make our bathrooms a whole lot cuter.

I'll keep you posted!

XOXO