Recycled Flowers

I saw this project in a magazine cut out my sister had in her special folder she made.  She had all sorts of fun and cool ideas, projects and things she wants all cut out of magazines and neatly placed in a three ring binder.

Yeah...I'm not that organized but I am glad SHE is.  While I was in Utah she got it out and I flipped through it.

So here is my version of what I saw.  I took a penny saver ( whatever kind of paper you want.  Book pages, newspaper, ads...whatever )  And I LOVE that I used the penny saver because we just throw it right in the recycling bin pretty much every single week.  Makes me so happy to repurpose these!

Let's get started!

Ripped out some pages from whatever source you are going to use.  Take some water and some water color paints and paint the heck out of your pages.

I tried a couple of different things here.  Here I painted the paper.  I also tried coloring the water and the crinkling up the paper and sticking it in the water.  Both work.  You have to have the water REALLy dark with the color though.  I let that dry.  Do both sides because you will be seeing both sides of the paper when it is all said and done.

Next I took some of this fabulous stuff

And I added it to some water ( I didn't want it to stiffen the paper TOO much! ) and coated the paper AGAIN!  Let it dry and then crinkle the paper.

Next you can do TWO different things.  I tried both and I am not sure which one I like better.

The first thing you can do is CUT petals out of your paper.

OR

You can rip petals out of your paper.  I like the look of both so try out both and see which one floats your boat!

Next you want to take a smaller petal and glue it to the center.  In the picture you see regular glue BUT I ended up using the glue gun and it worked SOOOO much better because it dried instantly.  Just be aware that paper is THIN and you will probably burn yourself at least once.  I kept putting my finger under the paper and then pressing directly onto the glue gun. DUH!  haha  When I use ribbon or fabric it's usually thick enough to not burn.

I found this floral wire at the dollar store and thought it would work perfect!  They had many different colors and any color would have looked great.

Put some glue on the wire and then roll the paper around it.

It should look something like this.  Then just start glueing all of the petals on.  I try and go from one side to the other to fill in all of the spots.

Once you get it looking good, try bending the petals out a bit so it doesn't look flat.

At this point I wanted them to stay like they were and so I wanted to add a top coat.  I have this

I took my flowers out side and sprayed the heck out of them using both.  I found the results looked pretty much the same.  Neither of them looked shinny to me but I love how they brightened up the color and made it a deeper shade.

Then I had a little too much fun taking some pictures of them

So go make some flowers.  The nice thing about these is your kids could help you make them.  They take a while only because they need to dry in between coats but other then the glue ( if you use hot glue ) your kids could help.

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