Papercraft Flowers: Beautiful, Lifelike Florals Anyone Can Make

1. Introduction: By working with all of these colors and paints and researching flowers, it really gave me purpose. It would make me feel more connected to the world because I really felt, like I was just lost. My name is Emily Paluska, and I am a botanical artist. I focus on recreating bits of nature whether it's flora or fauna, and my main medium is using paper. I also use clay and paint to make the paper come to life. I started making paper flowers after the birth of my first child. I was really suffering from postpartum depression, and I needed to find something to do. After I put the baby to bed at night, that was just for me. To set aside time to be creative as an adult, doesn't really happen unless you make the time. I started doing this practice of making a paper flower every single day for a year. When you become a mother, nobody really tells you how isolating it can become. At the time I felt like I was disappearing and if I could make something physical, it could prove that I was still here. I started to share them on Instagram. As I kept posting, more and more people asked me about it, and it snowballed really quickly. I realized how healing it was to use that creative part of your mind, and there is such a value in making something. I'm going to teach you all of the skills and techniques, step by step, and how to make a variety of different paper flowers, some of my absolute favorites, Icelandic poppies, tree peonies, cherry blossoms, different greenery and leaves, and so in the end you'll be able to create a bouquet of beautiful flowers that will last forever. I think oftentimes art feels exclusive, but I think paper flowers are for everybody, and I believe that you can do this. I'm so honored that you're here, and let's get started. 2. Materials Overview: Now I'm going to show you guys all of the materials that you're going to need to make all of the flowers and greenery that we're going to make today. I know it's a lot, but I promise that there are some things that you don't necessarily need right away, and there are some things that you have in your house so don't panic, I'm going to go over all with you. The most important thing that we're going to be using today is obviously the paper. You want to have a high-quality paper. We're going to be using a 180 gram Italian paper here. This is a 160 gram German crepe paper, this is 90 gram Italian paper, and then the last type of paper that we're going to be using is this German dab wet paper which is a folded bi-colored little folds here. We're going to be using this as well. Obviously for our stems, we're going to be using a variety of different floral wires. These are readily available. We have different gauges here which just means different thickness. Of all these different types, we have an 18-gauge craft covered wire, we have here, which is a thicker wire. We have an 18 gauge cloth-covered wire here, and then we also have a 22-gauge paper covered wire. You'll also want to have a really nice pair of scissors. You can also use your kitchen scissors, but as you get more intuitive, it'll just help you cut a lot easier to have a nice pair of scissors. I use these. These are my favorite pair. It's a dressmaking shear. All of this will be listed in the resources section so you'll be able to reference everything that you see here today if you want to buy the same things. You'll also need a pair of wire cutters, a paintbrush, a foam brush, some spun cotton balls, some floral tape and a light lime green tone, and then a couple of different types of glue. This is my favorite to use. This as an aliens tacky glue, it's craft glue, mod podge map, and just a good old Elmer's glue stick. Now these things are a little bit more optional, you don't necessarily have to have them. See here in front, I have my whole collection here of pun pastels. These are a highly pigmented [inaudible] pastel. You can also get chalk pastels. You can also use sidewalk chalk. You can also use none. I'll show you how we can integrate it and if you don't want to go buy chalk, you don't have to. We have these pastels here. Then the last elements are some things that you'll find in your kitchen and some things you'll probably have around your house. We've got a hot glue gun and some glue sticks, some paint in a green shade. We're going to be using this in our poppy glass. Finally, the two elements that you can find in your kitchen, we're going to be using turmeric and a bamboo skewer that you would use for barbequing. I know that the list of items seems long, but you'll be able to see how these integrate and as we're making flowers by each one, we'll be able to break down exactly what you need for each flower, and it will all make sense as we learn together. The next thing that we're going to be doing, I'm going to go over all of the basic techniques that you'll need to make paper flowers, some things that you're going to need to know about the paper and the materials that we're using today, and that'll help you create beautiful flowers. Thank you. 3. Basic Techniques: Now I'm going to go over just some basics that you'll need, some skills that will make making the flowers much easier for you. First let's go over the paper which is obviously the most important element that we'll be needing to use today. I'm going to go ahead and show you up close what this paper looks like. This is how the paper comes on these beautiful rolls. Then you can see as we roll it out here, that there's these vertical lines going from up and down, and then some horizontal things. These are just the machine lines, so you don't need to worry about those. That's just how it comes. But you can see these vertical lines, this is the paper grain, and this is the most important thing. When you're going to be cutting your petals, and stretching your petals, and shaping your petals, you're going to want to make sure that you're cutting with the grain unless otherwise told, and I'll tell you when those scenarios come into play. But you can see, this is going to be your most important thing is to remember, if you ever get lost, just look for the grain. This is a 180 gram. This is the strongest, the heaviest paper that you can get. The reason why I like 180, especially for people that are just starting out is it's very forgiving. It's really malleable. You can do so much with it, depending on how much you stretch or don't stretch the paper. It is great to learn with. Let me show you. A 180 grams means it has a lot of this weight here in the paper. It stretches three times its size. You can see how much this is stretching and how the texture of the paper is changing, if I stretch it or I don't. That smaller sheet now has turned into this long piece. The next heaviest weight in paper is the German 160 gram paper. Now it looks very similar to the Italian, except those horizontal machine lines are less apparent. You don't see them as much. I think this paper also feels a little bit more smooth. But when you roll it out you can see that it still has those vertical lines, and then you have those machine lines that are a little bit more faint and not as visible. The third type of paper that we're going to be using specifically for our poppy petals, is an Italian crepe paper in 90 gram. This one you can see that the machine lines aren't really there but that paper grain still is. You'll be able to feel it, but it's not as spelled out for you as that 180 paper. This paper specifically is fantastic for poppy petals. The last type of paper that we're going to be using is a German doublette, which is a 90 gram paper. It's two pieces of fine crepe paper that have been glued together. It's less paper, but you can see how realistic it looks. The texture looks just like real leaves and real petals. But you'd still want to cut and stretch with the grain, even if you can't see it as much. It might be hard to see, but these are dual sided in color. You can see there's a brighter green and then a more olive tone. Now the stretch in this doublette paper is not nearly as forgiving or vast as the 180, but I'll show you. This paper it's a little bit harder to work with. You want to be a little bit more gentle. But obviously I can't stretch it like the other one, but I'm still able to do some things with it. The reason why crepe paper is such a good medium for making paper flowers is because of the weight of the paper, you're able to shape it and mold it, and because of it's malleability, that is how you're able to bring a two-dimensional object three-dimensional. The thing to remember about this paper is, just think of the toothpaste in the tube. If you squeeze it out, it's not going to go back in. It's the same thing with this type of paper. Once you stretch it, that's how it is, you're not going to be able to unstretch it. I always tell my students, go light, and you can always stretch it more later. Now I'm going to go ahead and show you how to stretch these petals. I'm taking my thumb and my forefinger, and I'm going into the dead center of the petal, and I'm just going to lightly pull over my fingertips. But you can see I'm still holding tight to the edges. I'm not pulling all the way out. I'm just pulling just a little bit, and I can still feel give in the paper. I'm going to move up. I'm going to do the same thing again, where I'm pulling the edges, and I'm just bringing over the center part. It's starting to come out. Then I'm going to move to the bottom here. Again, you can see I'm anchored on the sides and I'm going to pull. Now you're going to start to see the paper start to take shape. I always say it looks a little bit like a Pringle chip. You're looking for this bit of a dip. Again, you can go back in and make a more pronounced shape. But you go slow and you're still holding onto the edges. Then now you have a petal. I'm going to show you what not to do also. What the tendency thing for people to do is to get overzealous and immediately stretch out the paper, and you don't want to do that. Again, remember how I said, it was important to hold onto the edges, because once you hold onto the edges, you're going to be able to keep this part of the paper intact, while only stretching the center portion. If you go in and you just go like this and you pull out those edges, you lose the integrity of the paper on the edges, I don't know what shape that is, but it's not the shape that you want for your petal. You want to have something like this potato chip, not something like this. Another important basic that I want to go over with you is your glue. A little bit goes a long way, and there will always be a tendency to use more than you need. I would say you don't need that much. However much you think that you need, you don't need that much. One of the things we're going to be doing the most is using our paper strips to wrap our stems, to add our cherry blossoms. I'm going to show you how we're going to wrap a stem while using the right amount of glue, so you can get an idea of what that is. When we're using glue, and I say dot glue down a strip of paper, which is something that I'll say to you quite a bit. This is what I mean. I'm just going periodically down the strip. It's about a half of an inch. I'm not going down the full strip. I'm just making careful bits down. That's how much of glue that I'll need for that whole strip. Remember how much it stretches. Even with how much it stretches, this is the only amount that I need. Now I'm going to show you how we're going to wrap a stem. This is something that people can get a little bit intimidated by or it feels a little bit awkward. A lot of paper flowers, and a lot of art in general, is muscle memory. With a lot of practice or even a little bit of practice, you'll be able to get it too. What I'm doing here to wrap my stem, is I'm taking my wire, this is the 18 gauge craft paper wire, and I'm just starting right at the end. I'm going to press with my fingertip for just a second to anchor it to the stem. Now I'm going to wrap it. I want to cover the paper, I don't want to see this. This is going to be a stem. To do that, we have to do two things. You need to pull this as we go, because you don't want to wrap the stem and have it look like this. Let me show you what I mean by that. If you wrap a stem without pulling your paper as you go, this is what it's going to look like. It's not going to be smooth. It's going to be bulky and that's not the look that you're going for. To avoid this, what you're going to do is you're pulling it as you go. I am right handed, so I'm using my right hand to control the wire. You can see I'm using my thumb and my forefinger and I'm just twisting the wire. This hand here, my left hand with my thumb and forefinger, is controlling the paper. First I'm going to come up here and just cover that end because I don't want that to show, and then I'm just wrapping. I'm using my thumb and forefinger. I'm only getting glue on one thumb. You can see I'm pulling it smooth, using my right hand to control the wire, and I'm just going steadily down. Now this is something that you can go slow on. This glue stays tacky for a while. Once that you get more practice, you'll be able to go really quickly like this, and it'll be second nature to you. Then I've reached the end here and I'll just tear it off, and now I have my future stem. There's two important things to remember while we make flowers today. The first thing that I tell my students is that this should be a fun activity. At no point should this stress you out. This should be only something that brings you joy and I only want it to bring you joy. This is something that we're doing together to be creative and fun, and nothing that should cause you any distress. The second thing is, nature is not perfect, so your paper flowers do not need to be perfect either. Have fun with it. Be creative with color. Be creative with how you're cutting and putting things together. This does not need to be an exact botanical replica. It can be something that is from your heart and I hope that you enjoy the process. 4. Create a Poppy: The first flower that we're going to create together today is the Icelandic poppy. The reason why we're doing this first is because this is by far the most requested class that I ever get, and I've never taught it before, so you guys are the first ones to get the poppy. Let's get started. First thing that we're going to be doing, we're going to be starting from the center moving out. We're going to build center of our flower and then move on to our petals. To build that pod, the poppy pod in the center, we're going to be using some spun cotton. It's essentially like a hard cotton ball, and then you're going to take your 18 gauge piece of wire, and we're going to start from the center again and move out. In this flower, we want to go ahead and take our spun cotton ball, and they automatically have a little hole in the bottom here, so you're going to be able to fit the wire perfectly inside. I'm going to take my hot glue gun and I am just going to put some blue here, stick this in. Then what I like to do is to just take my fingertips and remove some of that excess glue. One of the core things when you think about a poppy is, they have those wild funky stems and they're pretty thick. To build a thicker stem rather than use all of your wrist strength to build up this stem here, we're going to take an easier way out and we're going to use this tubing here. This is just plain old aquarium tubing, but we're going to use this to thicken up the stem. I'm just going to take this aquarium tubing here, feed my wire into it, go straight up, once I get to the end, I'm going to go ahead and make a cut. I'm going to go ahead and take my glue gun and actually put a little glue at the end just to seal the bottom. Now I've gotten the start of my center. To get that stamen, we want to go ahead and paint that spun cotton because we don't want it to be white. You can use any sort of dark colored green paint or even like a more lime green paint, and what we'll do here is, take our paintbrush. This is just a green acrylic paint, and I'm just going to go over the spun cotton ball. What you can do is, you can let this dry, it doesn't take very long, say about 20 minutes. Then, you can do another coat if you'd like, if you feel like it's not dark enough for you. But that's all it is. You're just painting that spun cotton ball. After I've painted my second round of green and now I have it the tone of green that I would like for my center, I'm going to go ahead and create the pollen look. It's essentially a cross hatch pattern here and we're going to create this by using this lime green floral tape. If you've never used floral tape before, it is pretty sticky so you essentially stretch it out to activate the tape, and then now it's sticky. The reason why I like to use floral tape as opposed to using just a piece of lime green crepe paper, is that it sticks, so it's not going to slip and fall off of your pod here. It's just going to make your life easier. What I'm doing here now is, I'm just stretching it out, so I've activated the tape and I'm twisting it. I'm going to go out quite a bit. I like to keep it on my role because I like to use one continuous strip, you can see this very long piece. Now we're going to create what would essentially be in real life the center of the poppy with pollen on top of it. I'm going to start slowly wrapping this tape. I'm going to go down a little bit to build a foundation, you can see, and I'm going to wrap back up. Now, this is what I'm going to do. I'm going to bring it over the top and once I've brought it over the top, I'm going at a diagonal. Essentially the first design you're going to want to make is an X. Then I'm going to wrap around to secure this so it's not going to move around. Then once I feel like it's secure, I'm going to go ahead and cross over again. Now I have an X and I'm going to do the same thing that I did the first time. I'm going to wrap a few times down here, this is going to bulk up this area and then I'm going to fill in these spots. Essentially, think about spokes of a wheel that you're making here and just do it carefully. It can feel a little bit awkward with all of this tape and wrapping tight. After you do it a few times, it will be a breeze. I'm going to need some more tape and this is why I like to keep it attached, so I can just keep moving down and I can keep one continuous bit of tape here. Then I'm going to fill in my final spoke here. Now I have that shape that I want the spokes of a wheel, and I'm just going to give this a nice good rapping to ensure that these are going to stay where they belong. Now, I'm going to take my scissors and just cut this off. Set that aside, you're all done with the floral tape. Take your hot glue gun, just do a little bit down the rest of the tape and just wrap it flat to the wire and you can adjust here. You need to shift things over and then I like to just take a minute to press tightly down so that tape is sticking. Now I have my pod. The next thing that we want to work on are the stamens. To do that, we're going to do a layered stamen with a lime green at the bottom and then the yellow pollen sticking out at the top. I have three pieces. Remember when I showed you in the beginning how we stretched out the paper and when we stretch out the paper, it changes the texture. In this case, I've stretched out the paper all of the way and I have one piece of goldenrod yellow and two pieces of this lime green. What I'm going to do here is, I'm going to take good old Elmer's glue, if you remember this from school. I'm going to take this and I'm going to put this purple glue all over one side and it looks like this. I've covered the whole thing with purple glue. Now, I'm going to glue this to this yellow piece, leaving just a little hint of yellow above. Not even a quarter of an inch, just a little bit of yellow peeking out at the top. I'll stretch it a little bit and press down as well. Now I'm going to turn it over, take my last piece of lime and do the exact same thing. I'm going to take my glue with my second lime piece, putting the glue all over the strip and this is going to dry clear. This makes it easy. You already did the hard part of figuring out where you want them to line up and how much yellow you wanted to peek out, but now you're just going to line this up directly with where you lined up that first lime strip. I'm going to press down just like I did the first time. Now you have this laminated strip of a goldenrod yellow peeking up the top between two limes. Think about it like a cookie or a sandwich. You've got the yellow inside and the greens on the outside, and then you're going to go ahead and let that dry. Now that yours is dry, we're going to go ahead and fringe it because you can see we have this nice fringed center. To do this, I'm going to go ahead and take my scissors, and I'm going to cut down 2/3 of the way. This is what you're going to be looking for in the end, you're going to turn this into this. You're going to want to make pretty thin fringe, but the most important thing to remember here is, if it's not super thin the first few times, that's okay, if it's never thin, that's also okay. But what you want to focus on is making sure that you leave plenty of space at the bottom, because this bottom part of your fringe is going to be what we attach to the flower center. I always say this is the shelf, you want to have plenty of shelf space to attach it. Here I go. I'm going to go ahead and I'm going to go down just 2/3 of the way, remembering that I want to leave ample room for my shelf at the bottom. I'm going to go slow and I'm going to take care, keep the width of my fringe as even as possible and I'm just moving my way down the strip. It does not have to be perfect, it's one of those muscle memory things that once you do it a few times, you won't even have to think about it anymore. Now I have my strip. We're going to go ahead and attach it to our center. I'm going to go ahead and take my tacky glue in this case, and I'm going to glue down that bottom base that I told you about that you wanted to leave intact. Now, this is where we're going to put our tacky glue. Remember, a little bit goes a long way, you don't need a lot, I'm just going to make some dots down here. I'm going to take my pod and I am going to go right underneath the bottom. I'm going to hug the bottom part of that pod and that's why we build up that tape there because it adds a little bit more bulk for this to rest on. You're just going to slowly go around. Now two things to remember when you are applying stamens that are important: you want to make sure that you're keeping the bottom edges even. Now, you can see I'm wrapping it like this. I always say, when you look up into the bottom of your flower, it should almost look like tree rings, everything is lined up an even. Because if you were to go down and then go up, you're going to have these big open pockets which you don't want. It's not going to be a secure shelf for your petals. You want to keep the bottom edges nice and even, and you want to make it tight because as you wrap this around, these glue or air pockets are going to automatically come up. You can see as I'm wrapping around, I'm just pressing nice and tight, making sure that this is going to stay where it belongs. I'll just take a second to really press tightly making sure that everything is going to stay where it belongs. You can let that dry a little bit, you can also open it up just to see how it's fitting around. Now I have my pod there in the middle. Now we're going to go into our petals. We're going to be using the 90 gram paper. Like I mentioned before, this is my favorite to use for poppy petals, it is the perfect texture for that inferior look. There's going to be three small petals and two large petals. We're going to actually be able to cut them all at one time, which is nice. There's no template for this, this is a free-hand cut. This is my first small petal. I'm going to just fold this paper right in half and I'm going to take my scissors and I'm going to curve this up, then I'm going to go to the bottom and do the same cut except I'm going to go and meet it in the middle. I just round it out so that the edge is smooth and not hard. Essentially it looks like a mushroom head. You're looking for a mushroom head for the petal. You've got this. Now let's do the second small ones together. I've got two stacked directly on top of each other. I'm going to do the same thing that I did before. Cutting from the top. Now I'm going to cut from the bottom, going for that toadstool look. I'll round it out, open it up. If you have any little hard edges here, you can go right in and smooth them out. Now I have my first three petals. Now I'm going to do my last two in the exact same way that I did my other small petals which is cutting up from the sides and then cutting up from the bottom, meeting in the middle, and rounding it out. You're left with the toadstool look. Again, just trim if there's any rough edges. I'm going to show you how we can add pastels. These are my PanPastels here. You can do any color. I often look at Google Images to get some nice macro shots of different tones and colors and varieties of flowers. I'm going to use this lime green here. This is a PanPastel brush. You can also just use a makeup sponge or a paintbrush. I'm just going to get a little bit of the pigment on my brush. I'm going to take my first small petal here. I'm going to make brushstrokes down. It's about a third of the way and I'm really going to build up the pigment. I want it to really pop. You should feel creative license here to make things super pigmented, very light. You just want to have it be nice and stark white. That's also a great option. Now that I have my pastel on my first petal, we're going to shape it, because remember, it's not going to be attached like this flat. We want to bring it and get it life. You're going to take your fingertips and you're going to do little tiny accordion folds back and forth over the whole petal. Your hands are going to get some pastel on it, just to forewarn you. In the end, it's like a little fan. What you're going to do is you're going to be a little rough with it, but not too much. It's not that delicate. You can be a little bit rough with it within reason, of course, but don't be scared to really manipulate it and move it and make it work for you. It looks really nice and tight. Then what you'll do once you've folded it up like this is you're going to open it back up. That's how you're going to see that beautiful fan. Looks like betta fish fins. This is why I like to use this 90-gram paper because this is how you get that shape. Now you have this beautiful petal. What you'll want to do is, this is pretty loose at the bottom, so we're just going to give it a little glue. I'm just going to dot a couple of dots down here and push it together at the base. I'm going to bring it back like this. I have this nice bottom edge here. Then to give it further shape, if you want, it's not something that you have to do. You can take that bamboo skewer that I mentioned earlier and play around with it. You can curl it up. You can curl it back, you can go back and forth and get the petal the way that you would like it to look. I like the way that this looks. I'm going to stop here. Now we're going to put everything together. We have our three small petals, our two large petals, and then we have our poppy pod with our stamens. I'm going to use hot glue for this. If you'd like to do tacky glue, you can. We're going to do our first three petals. Remember we have three small and two large. I'm going to take my first small petal. I'm going to just bend it back just slightly so it's going to cut those stamens a little bit more naturally. I'm going to take my glue gun and I'm going to put glue just on the tail of that petal. I'm going to go right underneath here so that the bottom edge of the petal, almost hits the bottom edge of the stamens here. It looks like this, this is petal one. Now I'm going to take the second petal and I'm going to do the same thing. Now where I build this, I'm going to put it about overlapping, about little over halfway. That's where you would line up your next petal. One thing that's really important to remember as you're doing paper flowers and the mistakes that I made when I was learning myself is I would get very focused on being at the perfect placement if someone was teaching me something, what is the perfect placement? One of the most important things to remember is to stop and look at your flower from above and to see how it's building. Maybe my specific one, I needed to go a little bit more to the left, maybe with the orange, you need to go a little bit to the right, but you're not going to be able to catch that unless you see it as you go, especially with hot glue in this case. With my final small petal, again, I'm putting the bit of hot glue right on the tail. I'm going to go right across from those two that are together. Now it looks like this. When I have my hot glue, even though hot glue dries quickly, I'll leave it there for just a second to make sure nothing is going to go anywhere else that I don't want it to. Now I have my final two large petals. You're going to do the same thing, glue on the tail. You're going to fill in these gaps that had been left by the small petals. You're going to line it up in the same way. I'm going to take my final petal and I've got my hot glue on. I'm going to go ahead and fill in that final gap. Now you can see because it's hot glue, I can open it up without the worry of things falling apart. That I can see my poppy coming together. You're going to take some green strips and your tacky glue. Don't use hot glue for this. You're going to want your tacky glue. The hot glue dries way too quickly and you would definitely burn your fingers, dotting glue periodically down the strip. I've dotted two strips here because I want to be able to just pick up right where I left off and make it a nice continuous movement as I wrap my stem, I'm going to go right underneath where all of this mess is. I'm just going to start wrapping just like how I showed you how to wrap a plain stem. In this case, we're just wrapping a stem that's completed. I'll wrap it a few times at the bottom just as an extra layer of security for the petals and to bulk this up a little bit. Then I'm just going to keep wrapping down. You can see I'm using my right hand to control the wire and my left hand is working on controlling the paper. I'm just moving steadily down. We're almost there and see now it's good that I had that second strip queued up because I'm all ready to go. What is a little bit of a trick once you get down here and it can feel a little bit awkward to keep wrapping from this way. Just turn your flower upside down, take up right where you left off. Just do the same thing, except you'd be wrapping up. Because we have our flower upside-down. Then I'll just bring it over the bottom edge, bring it down just slightly here and tear. Then you can save this green strip for later. For our next flower, you can use it. Now that you have your stem wrapped, the last final step that you can do, totally optional is to just open up your petals a little bit more, you can play around with them now that they're in their permanent space. This is why particularly I love using pastels for poppies because that center just glows. There you go. You've made your first paper flower. Now that you have poppies under your belt, make as many as you want, be creative, go crazy with the colors. We're going to work on peonies next. I'll see you back here. 5. Create a Peony: Our next flower that we're going to work on together is the peony. It's one of my most popular ones that I teach, and I'm really excited to teach you guys today too. We're going to start right in the middle and the first thing that we're going to do is our pods. If you look right here amongst the stamens you'll see those three pods, which look just like this, and there's going to be three right in the middle of your stamens. Then we have our stamens here and then our petals. Let's start in the middle and go with our pods first. I'm going to teach you how to make these. We are going to use a piece of 18 gauge cloth covered wire and also a piece of pink crepe paper, and we're going to grab a couple greens strips to create our pods. You're going to take your Tacky glue and you're first going to take your piece of pink paper. I'm going to dot glue down the bottom two-thirds of this piece of pink. It looks like this. I'm going to take my piece of green wire. I'm going to line up the top of my wire with the top of the glue line here. I'm going to write it right like this. I'm going to wrap it once or twice just to get the anchor there. Then I'm going to go back and forth in folds. Accordion folding, very similar to your skill that you already know from the poppies, and I'm going to press tightly, so that it looks like this. We've got this first part down now we're going to go ahead and do the final part. You're going to take your glue, dotting glue down your green strips, and you'll need roughly two green strips per pod. I'm going to go ahead and grab my pink center, and I'm going to go ahead and start my green strip right at the top. I'm going to feel for where the wire is and I'm going to start the top of my green, with the top of the wire. I'm in a rap about two to three times and really get this established right here. Now, I'm going to go down not too far, this is about an inch and a half. I'm going to go down and then I'm going to wrap up. You're going to bring your wrapping skills back into play here, I'm going to go right back up to the top. I'm going to go right back down to the bottom, I'm going to go from the top to the bottom about three times. Now, to get this pod shape, I'm now not going to go all the way to the top and all the way to the bottom. I'm going to focus right here in the middle, you're going to bulk this up. You've already established top and bottom you want these parts to be more narrow. You can see here, I'm just focused on beefing up the center. Keep thinking about that pod shape in your mind, you don't want it to be one big thick pod, you want it to be just thick right in the middle. I'm going to use a little bit more of my second strip and I already have that all queued up for myself. I like this size, it's bulky enough for me and this is how I want it to be. Now, I'm going to just tear it off and here we go. The last thing that I'm going to do is I'm going to give the top just a little trim. You don't want to trim too far down because you don't want to see the wire in the bottom, just a little bit of a trim just to clean it up and now you have your pod. Now that I've finished making all three of my pods, I'm going to go ahead and bring them altogether and combine them. I'm just going to position them in a triangular pattern 1, 2, 3, with the bottoms butted up against one another. Then I've got my green strip here ready to go with glue. I'm going to start wrapping at the base here where the wires are gathered together, and I'm going to wrap quite a few times because we're going to anchor these together here. Then I'm going to go up just over the bottom third, to secure them a little bit more. You don't want to go up too high and I'm going to just bring it back down. All I'm doing right now is I'm making sure that these aren't going to move around. I'm making them nice and tight against one another and here we go. This is the start of your flower, so you have that. Those three pods, 1, 2, 3 and now we're going to work on the stamens. For your stamens you're going to have this long strip of golden rod Italian paper. What you're going to do is you're going to fold it in half and then you can fold it up again in quarters. I'm going to cut mine into fourths and then I'm going to take my scissors and I'm going to cut a fringe, very similarly to how we cut stamens in our poppies. I'm going to go ahead and take my scissors making sure that that paper grain is vertical, and I'm going to go down two-thirds of the way. Very similarly to the poppy, you want to leave yourself ample room at the bottom because that's going to be the shelf that all of your petals live on, and as you could see with the peony, there's a lot of petals here. We want to make sure that we have a really strong shelf. I'm going to take my scissors and I'm going to go two-thirds of the way down, leaving enough space. I'm going to do some matchstick strips, they don't need to be super thin, they don't need to be super thick, and even if yours are a little bit thick, you don't have to worry about that. You can always go through and make adjustments and I'll show you what I mean by that. Now I've finished, I've got my strips. Now, I'm going to open it up and obviously where I folded, there's some chunkier pieces. I can go in and make a couple additional cuts. This looks pretty good, pretty uniform. Now obviously when you look at the stamens, the stamens don't look like this because they're still flat and two dimensional, we want to make them 3D. The way to do that is, you're going to take your thumb and your forefinger, you're going to twist each of these ends, so that it looks more like a stamen. You're going to go down this whole strip, so you can change this texture to this one. Now you have this nice, beautiful long textured stamen. What else we're going to do to make this look a little bit more realistic, is we are going to dip the ends of our stamens into turmeric. You can use cinnamon, you can use polenta, you can use any household spice that can give this a little bit. It's just a nice way to add a little bit of realism with not a lot of effort, this is how we're going to do this. I've got all my stamens and I'm going to fold them up, so they're more condensed. I'll squish them together, so that looks like this. The ends are nice and even and tight. I have my plate of turmeric and I'm going to just make myself a little glue pool. Now, if you have not used turmeric before in cooking, it can stain your hands, so just be aware if you have something going on where you don't want orange hands, keep that in mind. But I've got this nice and flat, and I'm just going to dip these top edges of my stamen right into the glue. It's pretty gluey here and now I'm going to dip it into my turmeric. Literally just dipping those ends into the tumor and I'll give it a little shake and now you have a much more realistic stamen and only took you a couple of minutes. I would let this dry a little bit just so you can not have turmeric all over your hands. Usually it takes about two days for it to fully dry before the turmeric doesn't go off all over the place. But a very quick and easy thing to do to add a little bit of edge to your flower. Now, that you have your statement all ready to go, it's dried, it's ready. Now we're going to put this onto our pods. Not to scare you but this is the most important part in building your flour and making sure that as we build the petals on later that everything stays where it is and everything goes the way that you want it to go. When we wrap our stamens around our center, we went to keep the bottom edges even and we also want to make sure that there's no air pockets, so we're going to be pressing tightly as we go. I'm going to have my Tacky glue. I'm going to do just a small section to show you. I'm doing just this amount. I'm going to line this up the top edge of the bottom shelf here, I'm going to line it up with that top edge of where we wrapped those pods together. I'm going to wrap slowly around and I'm making sure that the bottom edges are lining up and I'm going to stop now and press, so there's no gaps. Your paper will naturally stretch slightly as you wrap around and that is okay, you're just not going to be full-out stretching it. You're going to keep wrapping and you can see I'm pressing as I go, I'm keeping those bottom edges nice and even and this part can feel awkward because the paper is going in a different way than it wants to go. But it's going to feel easier the more that this becomes thick. Now I'm going to continue to put glue down the rest of my stamen and remember the two things you want to keep the bottom edges even and you want to keep it nice and tight, no air pockets. If you get stuck and there seems to be a lot of pockets here and you feel like you can't get it straight. You can put some hot glue under the edge and secure things if you get a little bit stuck. But after you do this a few times, practicing your skills, you'll be able to get there. I'm coming to the end of my stamens here, you can see there even and there's not pockets in the bottom. I'm just going to take a second here and really press tightly and make that nice and flat. You can see there's no pockets, it's going flat right against the wire. You'll just go ahead and set that off to dry for just a little bit and then we'll come back to it. Now, we're going to do the petals. There's four different sizes of petals. We have petal A, B, C and D. Petals A, B and C are all pretty similar, they all have six petals a piece, and D has 13. You're going to take some Italian crepe paper and you're going to take your first petal here, petal A and remember we need six petals. You don't need a stretch anything ahead of time, you can give it a little stretch if you want but otherwise you're going to go right into cutting and I'm an accordion fold back and forth with my template. I'm just going to cut right around the template and you're going to do this for each one. You're going to cut this for A, for B, for C, and D. C and D have a little variation to it which I'll go over with you. Let's do C first. You have your C petals just like this and you cut around the edges. What you're going to do is you're going to cut a V, out of the C petals. I'm going to turn it upside down and I'm literally just going to cut a V out. We would have this petal shape, as opposed to one that doesn't. Now, let's go over the differences in petal D. If you ever look at any petals in real life, their edges are often not smooth. There's a little groove, a little nick. For the 13 petals, I will break them up in multiple groups, a group of four and then groups of threes. Then I will just cut little nicks and crannies that are a little bit different. You can see, just to add a little bit of texture, and difference, and uniqueness to your flower. When I say cut a nick, it is really something as small as this. So taking your petal, and just cutting out a little bit just like this, and that's the only difference. Now, we're going to work on shaping our petals. You're going to stretch these all of the same way. The only thing I'm going to show you again is C, is the outlier here. We're going to do something a little bit different with C. For all of your petals, A, B, and D, you're going to do what we talked about earlier, which is your thumb and your forefinger in the center and you're going to pull out. Pulling out but keeping the sides intact. You get this nice chip shape. That's how you're going to do your main petals. Now, here's where the difference lies in Cs. If you were to go into the dead center here and immediately pull out, even if you're gentle, this is what's going to happen. It's going to rip in half, which we don't want. To not do that, what you're going to do is you're going to actually stretch these top parts first and then move your way down. I'm going to go up to this first prong. We'll give it a little cup. Second prong, give it a little cup and then move down slowly. Now, I have that shape but I didn't rip it in half. Now that you have all of your petals shaped and ready to go, now it's time to actually put our flower together. You're going to grab your stamens and you're going to grab your first group of petals, your petal A. I like to lay out all of my petals and I'm going to put glue on all six, right on the tails. Remember, tacky glue is a lot more forgiving than hot glue. You have some time to work with this, so you don't need to feel rushed. I'm going to line up the bottom edge of the petal with the bottom edge of the stamen. Here is my first petal here. I'm going to press tightly to make sure that this isn't going to go anywhere and now, we're going to overlap at halfway. Remember, how I said earlier when I say overlapping, I mean the widest point. So where it is the widest here and put that down. It's important to stop and look at it from above and see how it's building. Maybe, you need to make a little bit of an adjustment on your end and that's okay. But you want to make sure that you're catching it as you go, those stamens. I'm pressing tightly in the interim to make sure that none of these are going to fall off later. We got a lot of petals to go, so you really want to make sure that you take that time. I'm going to keep going. I'm moving my way around with that overlap around. I'm going to actually adjust mine just slightly because I want to make this come around all the way, so the overlap is a little less pronounced. But I was able to catch that because I'm looking at it from above. Here's my final petal for layer 2. Here I am. First layer, just like this. We're going to go to our 2nd layer. We're going to do the same thing as we did the 1st. We're going to put glue on the tails of all six, of our 2nd layer, pressing tightly as I go, making sure that no petals are going to fall off as we go around. Now, we're at my layer 2. You can see it starting to come together. You guessed it, we're going to do the same thing for layer 3. Really with the peony and most flowers, you're doing all of the hard work upfront. You're twisting the stamens, you're dipping them in turmeric, you're making the pods. So by the time it actually comes to petal application, you've done all the hard work. You're just finishing it up. I'm going to pick up right where I left off with the 2nd layer, with the 3rd overlapping halfway. Layer 2 and I'm starting layer 3. I would use tacky glue for this as opposed to hot glue, just so it gives you a little bit of flexibility if you make a mistake. Now last, we're going to do our final 13 petals. Remember I told you, you can add little variations and I tend to break them up in groups of three or four so I can have different variations for each group. What I'll do is I'll take one from each group. I will do these a little bit different and then I'm going to do them in groups of four. We're going to overlap in a little bit of a different way. I'm still putting glue on the tails but instead of doing a halfway point in terms of wide overlap, you're going to overlap them heavily. By that I mean, I'm going to almost cover where the V cut-out is. That, have you have an overlap. I'm going to bring my next petal and instead of going for example here, where we would go before, I'm going to go here so it's much tighter. I'm going to keep doing this. I don't think too much about making what one I put on with the different design. I just try to make sure that I'm not putting all of one group together and all of the next group together. I'm going to do that heavy overlap as I continue around, to meet the other side of my final petals. Now, I want to say this. If you're going around your flower and you feel like you can get around there, even with the heavy overlap with 11 petals, or 12 petals, or maybe you need an extra one, that's okay. You can make adjustments as you see fit. Just because I'm using 12 or 13, doesn't mean you need to use 12 or 13. That is just what has worked best but if you need an extra one or you don't need as many, that's okay. You're still doing all right. For example, for this one, I'm actually only needing 12 petals as opposed to 13. There can be some variation here. When you're finished with these, they look like this. They look really tight. They don't look like this big, open flower. This is a flower that I've let dry overnight. So it's nice and dry as opposed to this one that I just finished, which is really tacky. I can still feel it's wet. I can move it around. This is as hard as a rock. Nothing's moving here. You can do a lot with it. This, nothing yet or all of your hard work is going to be for naught, which you don't want to happen. The way to get it this nice, big, open shape is you're going to take your fingers and you're going to go right into the bottom and you're going to shake it open. That's going to open up your petals. You're just going to steadily move your way around, and play with it, and open it up. That's how you're going to get this big, open peony. We want to bring all of these stems together and add our leaves. To clean this up, what we're going to do is we're going to actually take two, green triangles of German paper. We're going to take our glue and we are going to put glue over, pretty much the entirety of the triangle so that it looks like this. Your green triangle is to finish up your flower. You can either do this while it is wet or you can do it the next day when it's dry. It's up to you. I'm going to go right underneath. I'm going to stretch these top edges and I'm going to stretch this edge, and it's going to meet the other side. It looks like this. I'm going to take my second triangle and go where that open gap is and do the same thing where I'm stretching it at the top, meeting it on the other side. Then once both of them are on, I'm going to press tight, down. Now, I'm going to take my green strips of paper and I'm going to wrap my stem. I'm going to dot glue down my green strips just like before and I'm going to start wrapping. I'm just going to wrap down the whole stem, same as before where I'm stretching it and pulling it so it's nice and smooth. The last thing that we're going to do to finish this, is to just add a couple of leaves. These are pretty simple leaves. We're just cutting a leaf shape and putting it on. You've done so much hard work with the flower head, that we're going to make the leaves a little bit more simple. You have your green paper and your leaf, and you're going to cut out two leaves. You'll do the same thing like you did with your petals, where you're just lining it up and cutting around. Then you're going to shape them. You're going to do the same as before, where you're cupping in the middle, leaving the sides intact. But in this case, we're going to do something a little bit different in that we're just going to really bring our hands over and use it almost like you would use a scissors to curl ribbon, to curl this top edge over. Then to finish this off, we're going to take our glue, put glue in the tails of the leaves, and you're going to just put your leaves directly onto the stem. One thing I'll say is when you're trying to figure out where to put your leaves, I would think about what vessel you want to put it in and also how your flower head is going to set. Obviously, when flowers grow, especially peonies that have such heavy heads and in nature, the heads droop a little bit. I always give my peonies just a little bit of a lilt here in the wire, so they're not directly up like this. That doesn't look right. You just want to give it a little bit of a curve. That could also help you in determining where you want to put your leaves. This is our wet ones. We're going to let this dry and then we'll be able to open it tomorrow. Now, you've made a peony. 6. Create Cherry Blossoms: When we've finished our poppies and our peonies, we're going to be moving on to make these beautiful cherry blossom branches. Like before, we're going to be starting in the center and moving out. Remember, you're building upon the skills that you're going through each flower, you're going to be more of an expert every time you make something. One important thing that I want to note when you're making a branch is to just look at the different elements of the branch. We have leaves, we have 10 blooms, and then we have some buds here. We're going to be bouncing around doing different things. We're going to start though with our stamens. Just like how we did with our peony, we're going to be using turmeric, instead this time they're much smaller and white. We're going to make 10 stamens for 10 blooms. Let's get started. Very similarly to what we did before, we're going to be cutting fringe pretty evenly down two-thirds of your white rectangle. In the end you have something like this. You're going to do the same thing as before, where you're going to go in and you're going to give them a twist. These are much kinder on your wrist and much quicker because they're nice and small, so you're going to end up with something like this. What we're going to do is we're going to dip our top edges of our stamens right into the glue, and then dip them right into the turmeric, give them a little shake, and then here you go. You're going to do this 10 times total. Your white stamens that you've twisted and given them texture, go ahead and dip them, all of them into the turmeric so you're going to have 10 total for 10 blooms for your branch. Now, that you have your stamens, we're going to go ahead and glue these onto our wire. We're going to be using a 20 gauge white cloth covered wire, and you're just going to put glue right at the bottom edge here. The same rule apply as before, you're going to be wrapping nice and tight so there's no hair pockets, and you're going to keep that bottom edge nice and even. Let me take my time and get around, so I have this nice little condensed thing of stamens. A lot of making branches is doing things repetitively. You're going to do this 10 times. You're going to have 10 stamens. We're going to go ahead and cut our petals. You're going to take a strip of pink paper here, this nice, beautiful blush color, and you're going to take your template for your petals. Don't worry, this is included in the resources, so you'll be able to get these templates. Each blossom has five petals, so it'll be five petals per flower. I'm going to line up my template, and I made accordion fold just like before. We're going to go back-and-forth. I have five petals total. Even if you have sharp scissors, I feel like five petals is a nice amount to cut through where the paper doesn't work. Now you are going to be cutting them 10 times. In total, you're going to have 50 petals. Now this is a trick here that we didn't do with the peonies. You can actually shape these all at once. They're nice and small, so we can shape five petals at a time. But the same rules apply. Thumbs, four fingers in the center, and you're going to pull while keeping the sides intact, moving up to the top, moving up to the bottom, and then giving it a nice little curve. You have these little petals. Go ahead and repeat this process until you have 10 stacks of five petals. Now, that you've cut all of your petals, we're going to go ahead and make our blooms. You're going to take one of your stamens and five of your petals. We're going to put glue on the bottoms of all five just like we did with the peony with different layers where we did six petals at a time. I'm going to put glue right on the tail. You don't need a lot, just a drop, and you're going to do that on all five. I'm going to take my first petal here, and I'm going to line up the bottom of my petal with the bottom of the stamen. I'm not going to press super tightly. I'm going to just use my fingernail as a placeholder there. I'm going to take my next petal and overlap at halfway, next petal, overlap at halfway, fourth petal, overlap at halfway. Now, here's the trick for the cherry blossoms. For the fifth pedal, you are going to still place it like you would where you're overlapping it halfway. But here's the rub. You're going to open up that first petal, and you are going to tuck petal 5 in front of petal 1. You can see it almost looks like a spiral. Think of a snail shell spirally now. Now you can really press tightly now that you've dun the tucking of the fifth petal into the first. Once this is pretty stable because there's five petals, we're going to actually open it up now. I'm going to take my fingertips and slowly open this up. I want to make sure that everything is symmetrical and looks nice because if you let them dry and then you open up later, if something's crooked, there's no coming back from that. You've got to open it up while they're a little bit wet. You have your first blossom. You're going to do this for 10 blooms total. We want to cover the back of our flowers. You can see behind here that we're not just wrapping the stem, we're covering up the bottom edge with this little green sepal and adds a little bit of pop. So when you're looking into the blooms, you're seeing this little bit of green from the back. This is how we are going to make that happen. We're going to take a green square. Take your scissors and you are going to cut little grass out of it. It looks like blades of grass, and you're going to have 10 total for your 10 blooms. What we're going to do is we're going to take our glue then, put glue down this bottom edge, and we're going to cover up this bottom part of the petal. We don't want to see all of this. We're going to go right underneath. Those little blades of grass are cupping it. I like to think of the center of the flower like an egg, and this is the nest that it's sitting in. Then you'll press tightly once you've made all the way around so that part is now covered, and you're going to cover each bloom so that they're going to look like this once we attach them. We're going to go ahead and wrap this because obviously when we wrap them onto our main branch, we're not seeing any white. We want it to be nice and green, so it's juxtaposed really nicely to this brown. I'm going to take a strip of green. I do make it a little bit thinner because it's going to be easier for you to wrap, and I'm going to take my glue dotting periodically down. I'm only going to go a little bit of a way. I don't need a lot right now. I'm going to go right where that green starts, and I'm going to wrap this nice and tight so it's nice and smooth. You don't actually have to go all the way down to the wire because, again, you can see it's hidden here. We're covering it up with brown. Even if you go halfway or three-quarters of the way down, that's enough. You can just tie it off and move onto your next one, and you're going to do all of your blooms. You're going to end up with 10 blooms that look exactly like this. We're going to do something that's very similar to those poppy pods, except we're going to be doing on a much smaller scale. What you're going to need is pink strips, and what we're beginning to be going for is essentially making a Q tip at the end of a piece of wire. Let me show you how to do that. I'm going to put glue down my piece of pink. I'm going to start at the top of the wire. I'm going to hold it once just with the glue sets, so there's an anchor, it's not going to slip and slide all over the place. I'm going to pull this and I'm going to wrap this a couple of times in the same spot, so it's nice and anchored. Then what I'm going to do to get this Q-tip shape is I'm going to bring it over the top, and then press it down. It looks really messy, it looks like you did it wrong, but you did it. You're going to just wrap over that mess and you're going to do this a couple more times where you're bringing it up over the top, flattening it out, and then continuing to wrap over that, so that it's nice and smooth, and so you get this nice little Q-tip shape. It doesn't have to be big, it doesn't have to be crazy, just a little bit of a bud. Then to finish that off, you're going to grab another strip of green. Now, this is one that I had used before and I still have some glue in that, so I'm just going to add some more glue and we're going to finish up these little buds. We're going to use the same skills that we did before and how we did the pods. I'm going to let a little bit of the pink peak out. Then I'm going to wrap and bulk up right here in the middle. Again, you just want a little bit of a bud shape and then you're going to continue to wrap down. I'm just bulking up this little bit of a bud, almost like the pod, but it doesn't have to be nearly as thick. You're leaving a little bit of pink at the top and then you're going down. It's the same way and how you're wrapping your blooms. You don't need to wrap all the way down. You just have to go about halfway down because again, we're attaching it nice and tight to the branch and you're not going to need to go all the way down with your green, so you can save your hands. Now, I have my three buds, my 10 blooms. Then the last thing that we need to do before we put all of this together is, we need to cut out leaves. There are three largely is at the top and five small leaves at the bottom. Two here in the center on opposite sides of the buds and three surrounding this bottom edge. We're going to do the same thing as before, where we're going to line up our template with our paper. This is German 160. I'm going to cut out five petals for the leaves, so you're going to have your stack, and let's go ahead and cut our large leaves. We're going to shape them very similarly to how we shaped our peony leaves, where we are copying them like normal, and then turning them towards the ground. The tops would be going towards the Earth. You can actually do these just like how you did your cherry blossoms, where we can go ahead and cut them and shape them all at once. I'm going to go ahead and give them a nice cup, and really focus on bringing them down again, tops towards the Earth like this, so those are ready to go. I'm going to do the same thing for the large. In some cases when you have small petals like this, it's actually a little bit easier you have a little bit more control when you're shaping them, when you have them stack one on top of each other. It's a nice way, time-saver, and it's easier to control. Okay, guys. We've got all of our elements here, so now we're going to put it together. Take a piece of 18 gauge craft paper, wire and brown crepe paper. Same as before, where you're going to dot glue down these strips. Now, I'm going to try to do this altogether. I'm going to do four stripes. You'll do the same as before, where you're wrapping nice and smooth down the entirety of your wire, just like this. Making my way slowly down and into the bottom and I'm going to rip it off. Now, you can see with these branches it has a little bit of a curve at the top, so that's what I'm going to do here. I'm going to curve this slightly back about an inch and a quarter. Then I'm going to take my large leaves. Remember, it's the large at the top and then you go smaller as you go down. I'm going to put glue on the tails of these leaves and we're going to put them on length the peony leaves. The tops of the leaves are going to be curved towards the ground. I'm going to put them in a triangular pattern and where there's the dip here, I'm going to go down only about a half of an inch. A triangular pattern around the stem, so just like this. Then I'm going to take my brown strip and I'm just going to wrap right at the tails of those leaves, just as an extra layer of security to keep them where they need to be. Now, look at this branch again, so it's five petals, buds, five petals, 1, 2, 3. The way that I like to do them, is I like to put the first round of five slightly to the right, the buds front on, and the bottom slightly to the left. It gives a little bit of natural variation. I've moved down. Now, I'm down about two-and-a-half inches, and I'm going to grab my first batch of five blooms. Now, I'm going to put all five of them and I'm going to be laying them flat against your main stem. You can see a lot of the stem of the blooms are against here. It's going to bulk this up so it looks a little bit naughty like a real cherry blossom branch, and then also you're able to thicken this up too. So it's secure set. I'm only leaving a little bit at the top with plenty flat against the branch and that's another reason why you don't need to put green all the way down because you're not going to see it. I'm going to wrap this a few times just to make sure that this is nice and secure and nothing is going to shift or go anywhere that we don't want it to. Now, I'm going to grab my three buds. Remember, I like to have my buds on the front of the branch, and I'm just doing this continuous brown strip. There's two leaves on this one, one on each side. I'm going to grab my first two leaves, dot glue right on the tail. For these, I want them to be on opposite sides of each other, so 1, 2 and I'm going to keep wrapping down, and I'm going to get to the bottom here. Last thing, I'm going to do my final five blooms, lining up all of the blooms flat against the stem. Again, I'm using my brown paper as floral tape, wrapping nice and tight. As I move my way down, I'm going to come back up and just really secure it and make sure that those aren't going anywhere. I'm going to do my final three leaves. I'm going to put glue right on the tails of all three. We're going to be doing them in a triangular pattern, just like how we did our tall, large leaves at the top. I want the tops of the leaves to be pointing towards the ground as opposed to having them curved up like the petals. I'm going to come back and wrap up and clean off the bottom here and bring this up a little bit, tear tear you're done. I'm going to add a little extra glue here, make sure this is nice and tight. Then once you have everything here, I like to do a little bit of a curve, so I'll put this one a little bit more towards the right, this a little bit towards the left. Just going back and forth to give it a little bit more movement. Then like I I everything's wired on individual so you can open your blooms up and move things around as you see fit, and how you want your branch to look. Bring your leaves down and clean it up and you've got your cherry blossom rich. 7. Create Greenery and Arrange: First greenery that I'm going to teach you, are these here. They look pretty similar to baby blue eucalyptus. They are a lot easier to make than they look. We're going to learn a really important skill here that's going to help you make a lot of different types of leaves and petals later. We're going to be using this really beautiful mint blue to mimic eucalyptus. I have a piece cut off here. I'm going to take my scissors and I'm going to go ahead and just cut, so I have the smaller strip. When you stretch or you don't stretch the paper, it totally changes the texture and what you can do with the paper. So in this case, we're going to stretch it all of the way. You can see I'm going to stretch it all the way, so it's as smooth as it can go, and I'm going to go ahead and just fold over into squares. I'm going to just do three here to show you. I have this accordion fold of three. I'm going to cut up the sides, and I'm going to go from the bottom right corner up to the top left. I'm going to have these three squares. I'm going to turn them into pairs of triangles. I'm left with three triangles and three triangles, so six total. If you look at any leaves or any plants, you'll see that the main vein of the leaf or plant, the leaf will go diagonally up, instead of just a straight leaf cut like we did with the peony. Here we're going to add a little bit of wiring because when you have a wired leaf or a wired petal, you can just move things around, and there's no expiration date on this because it's wired and you can do a lot more with it. That's what we're going to do here. To be able to get that vein line of going diagonally up, you have to do this extra step. I've got my first triangle and you're going to turn it over, so it's a right triangle. I can see the paper grain is going from left to right. I'm going to take my other triangle, the paper grain is going from left to right. I'm going to take my glue, and I'm going to glue down the longest edge, pretty tightly to the edge. I don't want to be gluing right in the middle, I want to go right along the edge. I'm going to take that other triangle, glue it right on top of that first one that we put the glue lying down. Then you're left with this triangle, and the paper grain is going horizontal. This is why we do this. Once they're dry, when you open this up, you can see that main vein line, and the diagonal shooting up and out. You will know what is the top and what is the bottom. You want to give your triangles a little bit of time to dry first, so say like 10 or 15 minutes. Now that they're dry, we're going to go ahead and cut out our eucalyptus. Now you can do this one of two ways. It's really a chunky circle pattern here, so you can freehand cut it or you can use the template that is going to be included, flying this up as evenly as possible and you're just going to cut right around it. In this case, I wouldn't batch cut because you have different sized triangles, because it's hard to make those be totally even, even if you're careful, so it's just easier to line it up one at a time, so you have this nice dropped shape. Now you have this little built-in flap in the back. Now I like to give it a little bit of a trim, so it's nice and straight. You don't want to trim it too much because we're going to put a wire here. There's got to be enough space for there to be a wire to fit. You don't want the wire to peek out. You're going to take this thin piece of 22 gauge paper-covered wire, and this wire is going to fit perfectly into this flap, and that's how you're going to be able to have this bendable leaf. I like to make sure that it's really nice and straight. I'll even press my fingernail down just to make that center vein pop a little bit. Then I have this, and I will take my wire cutter, and I have my first leaf for my eucalyptus branch. Go ahead and choose how many you want, I would say at least do seven. Now that you have all your shapes cut and ready to go, we're going to put these together and make them into a eucalyptus branch. You're going to take a piece of your 18 gauge cloth-covered floral wire, and some strips of the same baby blue that you've been using. I would cut them a little bit thinner that will l make it a little bit easier in this case since you're using smaller wire to attach and you're going to dab glue, you know the drill by now. You're going to take your first one here, and you're going to take your strip of paper and the wire and you are going to wrap it up to the top. Basically, you don't want to see any wire sticking out. You'll bring that down, keep wrapping, and then you're going to take your 18 gauge and lay it flat against that skinny wire. You're just going to wrap up a little bit to cover the top of the green and then you're going to keep wrapping down. Now you've attached the top leaf. Now you're just going to move steadily down. You'll bend it backwards, lay the wire flat against the main stem, and continue this where you're just wrapping your blue strip down, using it as floral tape, attaching your leaves one by one. I just do it on opposite sides. For this one, I'm only doing seven, I'm not going to make it super big here. I've got my final leaf, adding it on the opposite side. In terms of distance between each one, it's about an inch and a half. You don't want it to be too close to one another, but you also don't want it too far, so use your best judgment. I'm just going to cut this edge off the end, and you have your eucalyptus. All set. Our second type of greenery that we're going to do today is a leaf branch that looks a little bit more polished. We're going to be using the German Doublette paper, which is 90 grams. Remember, it's two different complementary colors with each other. What you'll do here is you're going to cut across, so you have this nice small fold of paper. You can set this one aside. We're going to cut out four leaves to show you today. Same as before, I accordion fold in , I'm going to cut up the sides. I'm going to do the same thing as before, where I'm going to cut from the bottom right corner up to the top left. Here's where the difference comes into play. You'd have to decide if you want the bright green or the dark green. I like the bright green. What I'm going to do is I'm going to take my first two triangles, I want my bright green to show as the top of the leaf. So what I'm going to be doing is I am going to be putting glue down the first bright green triangle. Then, I'm going to take my second triangle with the bright green, basing the bright green right on top of it. The color I want on the back is that all of tone. That's what I see right now. The color that I want is actually hidden at the moment. Let that dry for about 20 minutes, the paper's a little bit thicker, so you want to make sure that you give it plenty of time. Once it is dry, you'll go ahead and open it up, and now you'll be able to see those lines that we talked about before, that center vein and then those paper lines are going diagonally up just like a real leaf. There's no template for this one, you can freehand cut. I'm going to show you how to do that. I'm going to turn it over, so it's upside-down. Here's the top of my leaf, here's the bottom because those lines are going diagonally up, but I'm going to turn it upside down to cut. I'm just going to cut a leaf shape, I want it to be somewhat narrow, so I wanted to look more bailey flay and I have this nice leaf shape. Then, I'm going to cut the back to clean this up, and this is just like before, you don't want to cut too thin because you need for the wire there, and you're going to take your small wire, your glue, put glue in that flap and nestle this in here. For this paper because it is thicker, you're going to want to make sure that you take an extra couple of seconds to really press down and then use your nail and just pop that vino, and then you have your realistically leaf. One last step to make your leaves really pop is to add a little bit of Mod Podge. This is Mod Podge Matte, it gives it a nice little sheen, makes it look a little bit more real, but it's not overly shiny. I'm going to just take a little bit of Mod Podge on a foam brush. I'm going to turn it upside down and it makes it much easier to add a light coat of Mod Podge when you're going in direction of the grain, and I'm really making sure to nestle my phone brush into the middle section where the wire is because I don't want there to be a section of no sheen. Then you would let this dry for about 20 minutes. For this, I have seven leaves and we're going to attach them the same way that we attached our eucalyptus. We're going to be using stripes of green as floral tape and we're going to just make this into a branch. Your green stripes, I'm going to duck glue down here. There is really no rhyme or reason to however you attach these. I just go off from one side to the next and then back again. I'm going to take my first stripe, wrap it underneath to cover that bare wire, take my thicker 18 gauge wire, lay it flat, and attach it and make it as one. Then, I'm going to do same thing as before, where I'm going to take my first leaf, lay it flat, I tend to like these to go up, so it gives it a little different of a look as petals that might go down, it adds a little bit of a different movement in a bouquet. I'm not making sure that measurements are a specific distance in terms of adding the leaves, it's more, once I've wrapped the previous wire and it's covered, it looks like it's ready for another leaf. Definitely trust your intuition and you can get some great inspiration, look at plants online, look at all the different shapes of leaves that are out there and get creative with it. Remember, if it feels a little awkward to do it so far down, you can always flip it over, finish it off, feels a little awkward, you look a little awkward to you, but you can get it done, and there we go. Now you have another beautiful leaf branch to add to your level of skills. Our last step here, you've done all the hard work, you've made all your flowers, you've made all your greenery, and now that's taped together. You have all of these elements for a beautiful bouquet, and I'm just going to show you ways that you can make one for a vase. We have all of our different elements here, we have poppies, we have our dark green leaves, we have our eucalyptus, and the way that I always like to make arrangements is I'll set sort base down first, which is the leaves. I have my dark green stems here and then I'm going to intermix that with the baby blue. Now I'm going to grab some peonies. I always say and it's a florist rule is you always want to work with odd numbers, just looks better. Now that I have it all laid out the way that I want, I'm going to pick it off and see how it looks, and I want to put it in this urn vase. It's fairly easy to add more greenery as you go or add more blooms as you go, you can play around with how this looks with these poppies are all the same height, I don't want that, so I'm going to take these down, bring this one down a bit. Remember, that's the fun thing about poppies, you can really mess with their stems. Maybe I want to add a couple more flowers still keeping the odd number of blooms in play here. I've got all of these blooms, maybe this one's a little bit too much. There's no wrong answer. You can make it into what you want it to be and really play around with it. Another suggestion that I would have is if you have just a plain white vase, really nice to do greenery, and not so you could just have a nice thing of eucalyptus on your table, or you could do something where you just have a single poppy in here, and the great thing about this wire is you can bend it and twist it how you want, so if it's a shorter vase and you need to make it work, you can just make it work like this as opposed to if it was a real stem, that's not going to happen. You can make it work for you in the way that you want it to, for your own space. So happy arranging. 8. Final Thoughts: All right, guys, you've finished all of the flowers, all of the greenery, all of the arranging. You should be super proud of yourselves. There was so many materials so much to learn and I'm so thankful for you sticking through it. Great job. I would love to see what you made so please share it in the project gallery. I cannot wait to see your work. I hope that you really enjoyed this process and I really hope that this exercise of paper flowers can become part of your self-care routine. That it's something that you felt that you could do and feel confidence in it. Remember, that art should not be something that feels exclusionary, it should feel inclusive. I want to see what you can make. I know that you can make this. Please continue to create beautiful things. Just remember that nature is not perfect so your paper flowers don't have to be either and things don't have to be perfect to be beautiful. I can't wait to see what you create and I'll see you next time.