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Lesson Info

Paper Boutonnieres & Centerpieces

What we want to do in this next session is show you several different ways that you can use all of the paper flowers that we've been making here together and transform them into some event and party decor. Now, one place that I think is great for inspiration is pinterest, and in particular I have a paper floor pinterest board that we can scroll down a little bit and see there are hundreds of pins in this particular board, and it might be worth spending a little bit of time just scrolling through there to see some of the other projects that crafty people around the world have put together and posted there. There, you can see are paper flowers that we've been working on in the last session, but again, it's just a nice visual for you, and it kind of helps you do a little brainstorming and imagine ways that you can transform them in your own unique way. So, um, let's get started, my friends, we're going to kind of pick up right where we left off with our last segment of making the beautifu...

l little crepe paper flowers, and this is just a very simple way to transform them into a boot near or course, aj, perhaps you're planning a wedding, you're getting ready for prom, anything along those lines and you wanna have ah, lovely little boot near for your lapel or even a course aj for your wrist. What we're going to be focusing on primarily is a boot near today, although the transformation from a boot near to a course aj is really simple and I'll show you how to do that. So, ladies, in our audience, if you just want to take a couple of the flowers that you have created from the last session, you certainly can mix and match. We did two varieties. We did one that is this beautiful sort of coral trumpet shaped flower. And we also did these delicate little peach and marry gold color flowers that almost looks like a combination of, say, a dandy lion and a carnation. Um, pick two or three and I am going to let's see what we want to do here. I think I am going to take two of my carnation looking flowers and one of the trumpet flowers, and I'm just going to bundle them together in a little bo kay in my hand. We did make some extra leaves for the trumpet flowers, and you might wantto position them as well. And the wonderful thing about these is because they are on wire it's very easy to position and reposition in the multiple times, so don't worry about having your conference composition exact the first time around. What you really want to pay attention to is the height, and in general, you want to stagger them a little bit. Working in pairs of three is always a nice idea when you're putting these together, so you want to have one that is the tallest one that is slightly staggered down in height, and then I do no with these trumpet flowers, oftentimes it's nice to kind of bend them a little bit off to the side here you can see, of course, our boot near that I did, where I've got one that sort of positioned up one that's a little off to the side, which I think is lovely, so you've got your stems altogether. The bottom of your stems now you just want to gently fold them up, and this is going to serve a couple of purposes. You don't want any jagged bits on the bottom of your boot near and it's also going to just make it look a little bit more finished now, once you have done that, were going to take. There are a couple of ways actually that you could secure it and what I'm going to recommend you all still have some of the crepe paper at your table from our last session I'm just going to set the little bouquet down for a moment I'm going to go over to the green crepe paper that we used in our last session and cut out another strip we're cutting out a strip that is get a regular pair of shears here that is about a quarter to a half of an inch and with I'm cutting across the grain down the length of the crepe paper and again if you caught the last segment we were cutting stripped akin to this to wrap down the stems of are flowers and it really gave it a nice finishing touch we're going to use these in this session to secure part of our boot near together so what we're going to do now is take our strip decide which color we're working with the double sided crepe paper one color a different color on either side decide which side you want to be facing out put a little bit of white tacky glue on the end I'm applying this with a toothpick uh it just tends to make it a little bit easier to apply you don't need a tremendous amount only because um it works really well with the crepe paper and helping it too had here to itself and then I'm going to return to my boot near and I'm going to hold it in one hand, I'm just going pick a portion that is maybe I would say about an inch up from the base and what I want to do is I want to cover up all of the ends of the wires that we have bent up from the base and it's all right? If you're covering up the the bottom portion of a couple of the leaves it's not an issue, but what I'm doing now is gently stretching the crepe paper around. I'm adding a little bit of tension as I pull it around with my right hand straight crepe paper has that wonderful stretchy fabric like quality and then I'm slowly just wrapping it down. No, I'm not going to wrap it all the way to the base I'm going to stop about at half a niche from the base, so you see some of those lovely little loops that we created when we bent up our wire stands at the bottom when you get to the end, then go ahead give it a little snip to get rid of the excess portion of that strip and we're going to return to our toothpick and apply a little bit of the tacky glue, then to the end smeared on their rapid around and then hold it for just a moment to secure it now honestly, at this stage of the game you really could have a completed boot near you might just mess around with the the position of your flowers, but just to kind of give it a little bit of a finishing touch you all have at your tables here in the studio a couple different kinds of jew twine now you obviously could do this with ribbon you would want to select a color that coordinates with whatever your event or your flowers might be and what I'm going to do for this I think I'm going to work with this I've got this lovely jute and mint colored twine I'm going to take the stem and I'm gonna position the end of the piece of rope here I've taken it, I've overlapped it with the base and then I'm going to start wrapping it around and essentially what I'm doing is I'm covering up that tail as I'm wrapping it is that visible to you guys in the studio what I'm doing okay great wrapping it up and I'm going to do this just to create a little decorative cuff that could be anywhere from you know, three quarters of an inch to an inch and a half depending on how long you created your stem what you do want to be mindful of is you give yourself enough of a tail there to tie a little bit of a knot so I'm going to backtrack a little bit because I didn't leave myself a lot of room, but I'm going to wrap it around and tie a simple not at the top just to secure the top of that rope in place you see what I did there, so I wrapped it all the way up when I got to the top, I just kind of looped it through as if I were tying a simple knot and pulled that tight and of course we do have this little unsightly tail hanging out of the back there. What we can do is just make sure that your not is really secure given an extra little tug take your shears and you can cut it really pretty close to the base, but just to make certain that it doesn't unravel, I'm going to take a little bit of that tacky glue which will dry clear even though it's going to be a white when I apply it and I'm going to stick it just to that little frayed end matt it down just a bit and we're going to give that a few seconds to dry, but what that's going to do is it will secure it nice and neat and because the glue does dry clear, you'll never know it was there, so once you've done that now you've got a beautiful little decorative cuff at the base and the added the added advantage to having one of these cuffs on is it really gives you a good place to put your boot near pin through when you're pinning it to your lapel or whatever your outfit might be because if you were going just through this, the crepe paper there's a higher likelihood that the paper may report tear on depending on the event. If you're wearing this to prom, you obviously don't want it falling off in the middle of the dance floor, even at your wedding reception, that sort of idea. So now that we've done that let's, just play around with our positions with our flowers a little bit. So again, this is really just a matter of trial and error fussing with it until you kind of feel like it looks the way you want to for these, I'm going to be maybe fluffing out the little marigold flowers a little bit more, robert a view of a mixed fresh flowers of paper flowers, maybe if something's not in season, you know, I have seen on my pinterest board people that have done that and it's been beautiful. I've been a little hesitant I am sometimes afraid tio do that only because I don't want any moisture from the life flowers to affect the crepe paper flowers, but I know people have done it successfully and it's written been really beautiful so you can see that is a really sort of easy peasy way tio create a little wearable floral art you can see from some of the things that I prepared earlier I did a little one with just the trumpet flowers and then I did a base of the one with just the sort of carnation style marry gold color flowers so how are we doing in the audience everybody's got it well positioned and put together excellent you can see these air really simple and a really nice way to apply those flowers that you put so much effort into so nice everybody's holding them up to the job that I love that well that's that's where they go that's it that's where they go all right excellent well done well done so we're going to set those aside and move on to our next little party projects and the nice thing too about these one last word about the boot in years is that it's a nice memento from an occasion these obviously are never going to die and wilt I will say that you want to keep the crepe paper out of direct sunlight unless you do want it to fade away I loved that little anecdote that you shared from earlier about your mother putting the crepe paper out to fade one side to give her a different color but for your finished flowers you'll probably want to keep them in the color palette that you've created them in, so having done that, my friends were going to move on to creating some giant paper floral centerpieces using those beautiful paper flowers that you created in our first session. So in the last session, we all put together these giant violet colored paper flowers I have brought for everyone a couple of additional flowers to pair with them, so we've got a nice, beautiful sort of peacock colored one and a nice beat purple, and the way that we're going to pull these together is on a round corrugated cardboard base. These are pibe europe I basis cake basis you'll find these used whenever you buy a cake from a bakery, this is usually what is underneath them, you confined them in packs at most any arts and crafts supply store, oftentimes local bakeries will sell them to you ala carte if that's something that you'd like to do, these ones in particular are twelve inches in diameter and they are round um, you can work with square ones, they also have ones with scalloped edges, but honestly, we're going to be concealing the entire base, so you're really not going to end up seeing any of it now the first thing we're going to do is return to those giant paper leaves that we worked on in our floral making session. It's kind of kind of unfold those, and we're going to do a couple of things. The first thing we're going to do is we're going to kind of lay them out and get an idea of how many we might needs to cover up the majority of the base of our plates, and if you can swing it by just doing five that's pretty ideal it's nice to have one extra leaf to add to the center of the center piece, and I'll show you why in just a moment, but when you get an idea of sort of the positioning and placement of how you'd like them splayed around your board, we're going to go ahead and return to our hot glue apply a little bit of hot glue to the end, and I will say this your leaves do not need to go to the very center of your cake plate and completely obscured on ly because your flowers are going to be on top of that, covering a lot of the center. So if you want to position them a little bit further out to the edge of your plates, you're going to get more of them will be visible when the final centerpiece is constructed, so let's, go ahead and just start applying some of those onto our corrugated round cake base. I was sharing with the students a break that I recently put together centerpiece is very similar to this for ah bop mitzvah in los angeles and it was a lot of fun to see dozens of tables with these giant floral centerpieces adorning them and they looked really great and mass so if you are planning an upcoming event party celebration, wedding graduation party, these are a fun way to go and the other added thing again like all of our paper flowers, none of them are going to die none of them are going toe wilt and you can send them home with guests as sort of a parting favor a little thank you for attending and you kind of see here how I am spacing out my leaves a little bit I'm not necessarily worried about covering up that entire center portion, but I'm getting them pretty close together way doing everybody good excellence. So now the trick to putting these three flowers together is we really you're sitting at your table you don't necessarily want them all facing up if you're sitting mohr at a regular table height, you want the florals facing out towards you so you get a lovely view of those fluffy pom pom centers so let's start with one and what we're going to do is it's a little bit of trial and error kind of figuring out positioning sometimes the flowers wanna lay in one position a little bit more than they want to lay in another um that you can see how I've positioned it here almost on its side that makes sense all right and what I typically will do as I'll take my hand and I kind of feel under so where it's coming in direct contact with the plate and what that does is that gives me an idea of really where I need to position my hot clue so I'm going to lift it up and I know that this area right here is what was flush with the surface of my stand I'm going to go ahead and apply some hot glue there, apply a generous amount at that contact points and we can always go back in and secure down other portions that might seem like they're a little loose or wobbly go ahead and that guy right down then just hold it in place for a moment while hot glued does dr very quickly because we're doing these at odd angles and there is a little weight at the top of the flower you kind of want to give it a little support for a second while it sets up all right it seems pretty secure at that point, then we want to go in with our second flower and kind of figure out how it might best look leaning up against its friend here so again my little trick but from before once I have in the position I like it I said slipped my hand under to feel where the paper's coming in contact with the cake plate made lifted up and in my case it's right here so I'm gonna add a generous amount of glue to that portion and at this point you really can start to see it taking shape on then we have got our third flower contend with and you can see when you're putting these together the benefit of having some of the flowers constructed where they're a little bit tighter together maybe when you created them you you made some of them that they were a little bit more compact the's beautiful violent ones that we created in the last session are much more open we're going to cover a lot more space I'm gonna kind of plus with it here for a moment kind of see what angle I'd like it to be at slipping my hand under to kind of find the contact point all right when ads glued to this final fella how are you doing with the angles ladies where you feel like it's coming together enough yeah okay, now there obviously are some gaps and spaces between our flowers and that's where we're going to use some leaves to fill in those spaces I know that we just have that one leaf that we've saved from earlier but if we were doing this at home, obviously you could create a cz many of these, as you'd like to kind of add a little bit of extra dimensions, so, um, you can see from the overhead I've got this little hole here. Now, if I'm seated down across, I'm probably my dinner plates, maybe here it's over there, I'm not necessarily getting that bird's eye view that we're getting from our wonderful camera, but if you're standing up and you're walking around the table, you might still see a little bit of that cake plate and that's, where you can use some of your leaves to kind of disguise that. And so I think what I'm probably going to do is just take one of my leaves and glue it to one of the back of the flowers at such an angle that it really just kind of covers that up and disguises it, so I had a little bit of hot glue in there and again, the fun thing about these is that no matter the color scheme that you've selected for your particular party or celebration, you can always create paper flowers to correspond with it doesn't matter what the season is, you're always going to be able to make whatever it is you would like all right now, once you basically have it together, one thing that I would suggest just kind of first sturdiness is go around and find a couple of points where perhaps the pedals of the various flowers come in contact with one another and add a little bit of glue to secure them together. This is just going to kind of make it a little bit more stationary, avoid any potential wobbling back and forth while it's not going to be handled. Obviously, during the course of your event, most likely if your guests are taking it home, you don't want it to fall apart in the car on there, ride back to their residents. So there I'm going toe secure those couple of believes there and really, at this point, you're just kind of going around and fussing, um, making sure everything is a cure, I'm going to put a little glue here to it here, the leaf to this adjoining beat purple flower and this is also sort of your time to kind of pick off any of those little, um, hot glue strings that might have spun themselves across your flowers during the course of construction, but you can see how really easily that all came together years you're looking beautiful, I think we could have ah ah, high tea or a little brunch right now and have some very nice decor excellent are they feeling secure to you? The way they're coming together, yeah, ok, robert, I found that up. Just a piece of scotch tape, like a cellophane. You just a strip. If you I kind of wanted over your words like a magnet to the strength that's genius, you're good with the hot glue, their calf. Very nice. That is a wonderful tip, because it is often just unavoidable to get some of those little strings of hot glue and that's, a wonderful trip trick, taking a piece of scotch tape and just sort of swinging it through as a magnet to get all of those so well done. Ladies, I love it.