DIY Spring Blooms! Hanging Camellia Tutorial from Amaranthus Paper & Flora

Like so many great things, we found the duo of Amaranthus Paper & Flora on Instagram. But we didn't expect them to be in our own backyard. I love Nashville and how our hub of creativity takes so many forms. I just knew we needed to get Meredith & Cherie to share a peek behind the scenes on our blog, and they so graciously gave us a whole tutorial just for you! Enjoy making these beautiful blooms & check out their gorgeous work at http://www.amaranthuspaperflora.com, Etsy and Instagram! Have a great weekend!     Happy spring! We are Cherie and Meredith Eastburn, the mother-daughter team behind Amaranthus Paper & Flora, and we specialize in handcrafted crepe-paper flowers. While fresh flowers are a lovely gift or addition to your home or workspace, they soon wilt and die even with the best intentions and care. Our paper blooms are always bright, lively, and lasting, which make them an excellent token of love, appreciation, hope, celebration, or remembrance. While we love building bouquets out of our loose stem flowers, we have found that flat-backed blooms make great ornaments, gift-toppers, or wine-bottle charms. They could even be turned into a brooch or hairpiece! With that in mind, we are going to share the steps we follow to create our paper interpretation of a camellia bloom. Here are the supplies you’ll need:

• A small circular disc, about 2” in diameter (cut out of cardboard, or we use little cork discs from the craft store)
• Glue gun and hot glue sticks
• Twine (one piece about 6” long)
• Crepe Paper (we prefer the 180 gm crepe paper from Carte Fini and Paper Mart)
  • One color for petals (we chose Carte Fini’s 180 gm Pink Tulip crepe)
  • A second color for the flower centers (we’re using Carte Fini’s 180 gm French Vanilla crepe)
• Scissors
• Petal template (Click the link to print straight from your browser, or you can control-click to save the downloaded link to your computer)

Let’s get started! 1. Begin by cutting out your petals. You will need 4 small, 8 medium, and 6 large petals. While you can cut each petal out one at a time, we find that folding over the crepe to cut through several layers at once is more efficient. Six layers is about the thickest we like to cut at a time. 2. Once you have each of your petals cut out, you will need to form them by cupping and fluting. To cup a petal, gently stretch it at its widest point, curving the edges toward you slightly as you stretch. It will look a bit like a spoon now. 3. Then, ruffle the top edges of each petal. To do this, hold it between your thumbs and forefingers with both hands. Gently stretch one side away from you and one side toward you, just a tiny bit. Keep doing this, moving along the entire upper edge of the petal to create the ruffled texture.   4. Now prepare the center of your flower. Cut a strip of crepe about ¾” wide and 6” long with the grain of the crepe going the short direction. Fringe cut this strip. 5. Roll this fringe strip and secure it with a dab of hot glue. Bend and open the fringe pieces as desired. 6. Now you’re ready to glue! Begin by hot-gluing the twine in a loop-shape onto the circular disk. We like to use a little scrap of crepe to cover the glue and ends of the twine loop.   7. Your large petals will become the outermost layer of petals on the disc. Begin gluing each of them on, placing them so that about half of each petal overhangs off the edge of the disc. Space them so that the first three petals get you halfway around the disc. Glue the final 3 large petals to mirror this spacing the rest of the way around the disc.   8. Glue your medium petals on placing them inward from the large petals. They should overlap the large petals, covering up the large petals’ bottom edges. With a total of 8 medium petals, you should aim to make it halfway around the disc with 4 petals.   9. Now glue the smallest petals inside. With a total of 4 small petals, we aim to place them at 12, 3, 6, and 9 o’clock around the disc.   10. Finally, glue the fringe roll in the very center to become the stamen of the camellia, and your bloom is complete! Our favorite way to use these is to hang them on a bottle of wine for a hostess gift or to tie them on the top of a birthday present with a simple ribbon. We hope you have fun creating and sharing your blooms!