Tissue Paper Flowers

Tissue Paper Flower have been around for a while, and I always thought they would be fun to use in a project but couldn't ever come up with anything to do with them...til now.  I asked my 3 1/2 year old daughter, Belle, how she wanted her room decorated, if she could have it any way she wanted it.  She replied, like a garden. We talked a little more and she decided on more of a "her sized" garden.  No living like a tiny fairy in huge garden--no Tinkerbell land.  

From this I immediately thought tissue flowers, and asked her if she wanted flowers in her garden.  She told me she wanted them all over the walls and ceiling in a variety of colors.  That's perfect!  Tissue flowers are lite and I should be able to find something to hang them on the ceiling with. 

So off I went!  I found some left over Yellow paper and went to eHow to refresh  myself on how to make these flowers.  (I think I read a few different instructions and came up with my own.)  I made two decent yellow flowers, and Belle loved them.  I decided to take a few pictures of her with them and thought I'd share before showing you the red flower tutorial I made for you!

Isn't she darling???

 

Belle's main color she wanted in flowers was red, so off to Wal-mart I went.  I found this 3.00 tissue paper pack for a wonderful .75 cents!  I know, two shades of red, and some green.  Perfect.  I grabbed two packs and some "pipe cleaners" for this project.

Once I got home, I took a piece of green, dark red, and two piece of light red; placed them on top of one another; and folded and cut them in half.  I took the four halves and made an accordion fold  across the length of the pieces and secured them in the middle with a pipe cleaner.  (I did make sure the put the green paper on the same side of the pipe cleaner tail, so the green will be on the bottom.)

Four sheets

You can see the two halves after being cut.

After folding and securing.

 I fanned one out to let you see what it looks like just before you start to fluff.

 There's no set way to fluff out the tissue, really.  This flower only has 4 layers so I took the top and bottom layers and fluffed them at the same time.  You just have to be careful not to rip the tissue paper too bad.  It's not terrible if you do rip them...a few of mine got ripped but you can't even tell. :)  Then I fluffed the other two layers together.

 You will want to do a final fluff once you get all your pieces apart just to make your flower a little nicer.  It doesn't by any means look like "real" flower, but good and cheap for your kids room is good enough for me.  This flower literally cost me less than $ 0.10 to make! They also weren't hard or very time consuming to make.

Finished Flower.

 I took a picture of 5 flowers before being fluffed and then after so you can see some of the sizing of these.

Here you can see the Green on bottom.

Fluffed Flowers.

This last picture is of 18 or 19 flowers strung together with the pipe cleaners.  I am thinking of a fixing them to chicken wire and then stapling that to the wall and ceiling...I still have a lot of flowers to make, but I will post when I get this huge project finished.

I know this isn't cricut-e or anything, but it's crafty, easy, cheap, and fun.  I hope you enjoyed!  I loved taking pictures of my kid with yellow "pom" flowers on her head!