Lessons

Lesson Info

Large Paper Flower Garland

Now this one is much more intensive, so if we're talking about like taking it up a notch, this is really taking it up. So when I say seven foot garland, a lot of times, that doesn't sound very big because we have little pieces and then at seven feet long, this is actually we can see it up here, it's seven feet long. It fits my mantle perfectly. So I'm going to actually use it at christmas with some of our market street line on our mantle and just for, like, a little bit of a different look, and you could add in, like, really pine cones if you wanted to make it more christmassy, I'm gonna actually show you it's, not on there yet that some berries and some little cats tales that you can add in, um, I think that's what they're alright for let's, move on and look at that so in our shop, not going to go there, but in our shop, you can see. Every color of card stock that we use in this project, it's already kidded for you, so you don't even have to think about it, and the way we came up with...

this project was a little bit unique. So I don't know if you guys have ever heard the term steel like an artist, essentially like no one comes up with the new idea, right? Like artists are just taking concepts that they've seen other places and then creating artwork. I don't believe in copying, and I don't think that's good, but I do love being inspired, and this project was actually inspired by a piece of pattern paper that we sell ourselves, so it wasn't fired by us for us, I guess. But one of our designers, jin alison, created this really beautiful paper in the christmas on market street line that had sort of like a floral swag in it, and I really, really loved it. I loved the way that it looked, and I thought, wouldn't it be cool if you created a really life version of that? And so that is where the concept came from. Andi, I think it's really good to just think about different things you can be inspired from and what you can create from that, so this was all started from this piece of paper. And we're going to go from there, so the things that I really loved about it, I loved the colors, so I pulled the card stock colors from it. I really liked the shape of the flowers, which is really in style right now, kind of that throwback, teo, the toll painting that used to happen in the eighties and nineties, and then sort of the flat quality of the painting, but I knew that I could create depth in the shape of the flowers and the leaves I was creating s so that is where we're going with this. So I have made templates of all of the leaves and flowers for you within the class, so that you don't have to create your own shapes or your own patterns, which is really nice, because I think that was probably took the longest out of everything, and after this it's just cutting and layering, so we are going to go ahead and make the flower in the centers, you can see exactly how he did that, and then we'll have all the templates for the leafs, which we've already started to cut here for you and available in the course, so the flower is cherry red card stock again, has that really pretty linen texture to it? This is my template, and I'm just going to follow it um it's a block basically that's what the shape of the flower is and you can notice that I'm not going to follow these temple it's perfectly because it's okay it's just meant to be handmade that's what this style of painting is its hand painting and I wanted the flowers also to look that way this is the very opposite of the last project with the gym where we're trying to be exact and precise so just follow along the curve of the flower and initially I've made this project without any painting and I realized that it just looked way too flat it needed some extra texture and to mention and so then we went in and painted the details which we will do here as well all right so here's our basic flower shape that goes in this center and just looking at it I think I want like a little bit more of a curve in here so I didn't follow the temple very well they're okay the next thing for the flower I literally just looked at the paper and sort of created the exact same flower so the next thing you're going to need is two different pieces of card stock one is a crew and one it is called aqua tint and this is going to make the center of our flour and I don't have a template for that because literally all I did was create blobby shake so for the main center, I just started kind of curving around in and out to mimic the shape of a flower in the pattern paper and then the nice thing about the center is it's not a perfect circle so you can do it by hand and it's not going to look bad so I just cut into the paper a little bit and I don't want it to be too much like too curvy but a little bit curve is okay, all right, so the last thing for the flower center was our little flower pedals that go around the middle and the cool thing about not cut that in rows chintz comes in the kit and they are just raindrop shape but not perfect raindrop shapes just natural little shapes and we're going toe put those all in coming out and again what I love about this project is everything's like a little bit wavy, a little bit curvy and a little bit in perfect so it it's a stress free sort of creative experiment. I don't mind if it comes to like a funny little point. I don't mind if some are big and some are a little uh it just it's just a really fun easy thing to dio this would be a great project to do that ends up looking like you really knew what you were doing with someone who maybe is uncomfortable with crafting right, because it's going to turn out and it's going to look good, even if you can't cut perfect circles or shapes. Okay, and so we would keep doing that. Do you see how it's starting to, like, look, just like the flower in the center of the market street paper? So the next thing we were we are going to do is to paint it so we would cut out all the different shapes and all the different shapes of the leaves, and we have templates. They're listed by letter. So you know exactly what to cut and where that I'm gonna pull out some of all of these, and we will start painting them there. Thirty five sheets of paper in the spanner on dh that's. Why it's so long and so big, and it actually makes that kit like, really reasonable to make a big, huge statement piece for your christmas decor. I actually think I'd be really easy to to just change out the color slightly or some of the leaf shapes and make it for spring or like a fairy princess. Party or you know, there are a lot of fun things that you could do with this garland so we've cut out some of the basic shapes I created a holly leaf shape it wasn't even in that pattern but I felt like it would make it just a little bit more christmassy and I wanted that so it created a few holly leaves we have I'm calling this like a bay leaf because that's about that shape I don't even know what this is I just made it so you can just see the different shapes of leaves we have here now if I had just added them on again, I think it would look really flat so I wanted to add just a little bit more depth and dimension and they get look a little more handmade and a lot more like the hand painted element of market street so we're going to now paint on all of these before I do that I just wanted to point out that every template fits on a told by twelve sheets but from diagonal to diagonal so they'll all work um diagonal to diagonal as you're cutting them out and I just cut them all out with scissors really simple like I said, you can't mess it up because it doesn't need to be perfect act that's the name of this project don't make it perfect um okay I'm gonna grab our paint and I used to different kinds of painting this mainly because that's what I had sitting around at my house and why go out and buy something if you already had things that worked so in this project I'm using a martha stewart craft paint its satin and the color is p shoot I have an americana craft paint and sea glass and then just a white if I wanted to make them a little bit lighter and then I at my house have kids watercolors sitting around, so I went ahead and used that as well to get some of the darker greens that we're going to use um basically what we're going to be doing is going around the edges to create a little bit of darkness a little bit of of a darker edge to it and then we're going to be creating the veins in the leaves and again, I just used whatever like little kid paintbrushes we had at home nothing fancy or expensive because I'm really bad about cleaning my brush so I don't know what that says about me but doesn't need to be fancy or expensive and I'm not a painter, but I just adding that little extra element just really helps so we're going to start out with our centerpiece and you can see we just took kind of like a little brown yellow kind of color and started going around the edge and I'm going to bring over I always try and paint mountain boil in case I make a mess which happens so I'm gonna get it really wet in the beginning and sort of dragged in and then I kind of do opposite take it from the inside and drag it out and what that does is creates like a little bit of ah variety so it's not all heavy on the outside or heavy on the inside of my brush strokes okay, so easy anybody can do it and he used a little bit of a darker brown in just a couple places while it's still wet so see how it kind of believes into there and if it gets to the point where I don't like it I think like it's looking too much you can come in and remove some but I love like this little edge in here I think it looks really nice and in some places I might come in with just a fairly light so it's all just about like adding a little bit of variety and again I like it really wet so kind of bleeds onto that linen ee paper and I went pretty far in the middle there and it's okay, all right can't mess it up okay, now there you can see there's a little bit of a hard edge in there to me and so I'm gonna kind of come in with just water and blended out like a little bit and then I wanted this center toe have even like a little more texture so you could take a brush a lot of times I will use um and old toothbrush, but I'm just going to speckle and turnout to get about me um just a little bit, you know, hold this up citizen flick you see that it just flipped and we just add like, a little bit of a speckled detail to the center and that is the center right there, so essentially with each new piece we're going to go in and do the same thing with the red I didn't want there to be a huge difference there's no vain ing in the flower, so what I did is I just took a red that was close and just went around the edges and it really especially while you're painting it, you don't even see very much of a difference, but later as it dries, you can see on their you do start to see some and I came in probably about an inch on the flower and just go all the way around the edge as we continue going to do this a little bit faster than they normally would so that you guys aren't watching paint dry that's never interesting or fun okay and I would probably continue to change out that tim boyle so that I don't get paint for my last whatever in painting on what I'm painting now all right? But the point of it is I am definitely not a painter I my mom actually was like a beautiful toe told painter and could probably like make something way more amazing but it doesn't need to be the whole point is just adding simple depth and dimension and having it look handmade and if you want to miss like a couple of spots too, you can do that and I think that looks good after a zip drive as well just going to keep going around and we'll move on to one of our leaves while this tries okay? So I would let this dry set up over here and let that dry as I move on to the different leaves and I wanted to show the leaves because they're just a little bit different and sure here okay? So for the leaves especially the darker ones on dh some of these textures air smooth some are shiny some our um let's see if we can find have a glimmer to them so they actually have like a little bit of a diamond finish to them which is really nice and so but this one in particular is smooth and so I really wanted it to have more of an element to it see if I can find ok, so I like um as I'm doing kind of the middle to find like a longer brush as opposed to a flat wide brush and I'm just going to get what even though I'm using the craft pain it's not super solid and I'm just going to follow it as you would see on a leaf, the veins and as I go down, I get heavier so the line gets wider and then as I get to the very end, I get lighter so the line is thinner and if I don't get a smooth as I like, I can go back in with like just a little hint of water and sort of smooth out that finish and that's it so it's how where you sort of apply the pressure so again going to come in here and I want this have more of an opaque feel and that's why I keep adding water even to our craft paint as opposed to just a solid solid pink color come in so you're a little heavy little and you can see it really is thin it's not a lot it's not a heavy line we just want to show a little bit of depth in there ve ning and then I would go maybe into some of the edges into the individual leafs and I wouldn't do them all notice like a few in here so I'd continue painting that out and then if I want a lot of times I'll add just a little bit well the highlight into some of my life and generally when I'm adding and highlights all decide where I'm going to hang it and where the light would naturally come from so if I was going to hang it on my mantle and my windows to the right my highlights on my item will all probably be to the right because that's where the light would hit it naturally anyway so if you know that that's helpful if you don't you can just pick a side that you want highlights from um and go with it but so I would if it was hanging this way you know it add in all my highlights on the same same away okay let's talk about these bigger guys so for this I wanted it to be just a little bit brighter you can see in fact let's do it on a holly so for the holly I knew I was going to be curving it and creating curves and dimension so I wanted a curvy line in it and it can sometimes help you to kind of score a line just using that bone folder like I showed or even your finger sort of give you an idea of the shape they want before you painted in get back to that brush and I'm going to use this brighter green, maybe a little bit of a black to get it where I wanted to be, ok? And I would just come in following the shape of the holly thicker in the middle of dinner at the edge, we're gonna go thicker, too thinner, and I don't want to do a lot because I don't want it to be too crazy, okay? And then I would go along the edge of this is well and a lot of times with these with the bigger leaves to get the edge, I would come in again just from the outside towards the center so there wouldn't be quite such a harsh line and again, it's so easy can't make a mistake, just play with it. I'm going to use a bigger brush just to cover more area. Okay, well, we don't need to actually finish this because I think you get the idea of it, but I wanted to show just how, like you can see like it is, it does have that water color sort of bleeding edge, and I want that. I'm totally fine with that you can't make a mistake get the pain on there and it's gonna have the depth and dimension that you want, so while that dries, I want to create one more element to creates more depth to our project that isn't even on there yet, so we'll show it to you and then show you how we created it I am going to plug in we're going to be using hot glue for this I'm going to let that start to heat up while I show you what we did, so I actually went in and bought floral wire from the floral section and floral tape and I felt like it would be even better as a garland if we added in some rheal looking elements, so we've made little berries and kind of seed pods to add and they're wired and so they can come out wherever you want them to come out and it just gives it that extra special touch and these air so simple and easy to make, so we're gonna make one on that drive. So for these, all you need to do is cut strips of paper and I've cut these to be we probably a little bit right near a quarter of an inch and I'm gonna try and get him a straight as I can, but if they're not perfect, this is one time that that's okay we're going to cut a whole bunch of these because these are going to make our seat pots that did not perfectly so just cut multiple strips of your card stock and I think we're good now and the way I've created this is simply by layering circles, so I just create the size that I want it to be initially and then cut that and then we're just going tio hot glue if it's hot enough and mounted him so that's our first sort of piece of it and then ah, the way I do it is just go across and we're just going to keep mounting it in a circle so now I'm gluing onto the bottom of this piece I'm running out all the way around and touching and then just trim off the excess that's the bottom so it's not really going to matter and then I start filling in now we're on the diagonal using the longer piece and cutting it just helps me not burn myself you could cut them all decides if you wanted to, ok, but can you see how it's starting to create that shape of a little seat? And I just keep doing that until I fill it in and you can fill it in its full is you want I have done some that are really full like the's where you don't really see the inside and it's just true circle or I've done some that are more like this that are kind of open and airy, and they both look good. In fact, you could do one right next to the other, and they would just give it a different element to it. It's finished gluing this one. Um, and then we'll create our base. So our base I actually created just by fringing a piece of the darker paper and the way you do that is just cut the strip that you want your stem to be. And in this case, it's about an inch and a half, give or take, and you can either use fringing scissors like martha stewart has some no other crafting companies have them as well, or you can just cut yourself. Don't cut you ears off cut friend yourself as we go through, you do that all the way down. So the fringing scissors just take a lot of time out of it from that you can easily do this yourself and you could do it with the rotary blade. Teo, I just think it's faster and easier with the scissors and they don't have to be all exactly the same length as you can see just keeps twisting and what I did then. It was just create a circular shape and you want so paper has fibers and it's really important that you work with those fibers there's a post is just breaking those fibers, so instead of just like kind of crushing it, I'm going to really work with it to sort of curve it with my fingers and create a circular face and then these we just friends right out, and we'll be putting the cpa operate in there, so you see, it just creates like a nice base, and it hides the floral wire that we're going to hot glue on, so I've found with these they're actually heavy enough that you want to use to flora wires and then use floral tape around them to kind of hide it. Um and I didn't bring the floral tapes, so I'm just going toe put them together, twist them a little bit and to create a base I like to just do around shape, so that there's a lot of area to glue on. So did you see? Can you see that? A little loop and I've sort of twisted it and nodded it at the base that way, as I am hot gluing, I have more surface area than just that to glue two, so I'm just going to give it like a nice big dab, hot glue and stick right on and the reason we create this it's just sort of hide that little not I feel like the fringes probably like a little bit too long so we'll give it a little haircut and then I just start gluing hot glue is like my favorite thing in the world I think and I'm gonna start small so I go right along the base and then I start creating bigger like loop it out I would go it right there and now we have a lovely little sea pot and it's nice and tight on there and it's gonna go right into the garland so the way I would add thes is I loved so I had created a large and a small to kind of go together and the small doesn't have anything on it because the wire was so small in the base you're not really seeing it shorty's let's see if I can reach on guy placed it right in here and I actually wrapped it around the base just to hold it in place and they film out right here so it just adds like that extra little texture and dimension and interest to the overall thing to make it feel like a little bit more real and that's why I think if you wanted to add some pine cones at that point you could just take some like little small pine cones and stick it right in right on to the end of a floral wire or even just right into your garland so the last thing we're going to do is just mounted all together and we are going to do that on phone court bored so I just took a piece of foam core board from like hobby lobby or michael's anywhere office supply store and just trimmed it down to the curve shape we're going to start on one half so I did one half and then I did the exact same thing on the other half and put the flower in the middle made it really easy and it also makes it so that if you need to break it apart to store it or ship it then you can do that and then put it back together I'm always thinking about storage because I have like zero closets and my house so you got to think about that as you're creating things let's just clean up a little bit so that we can see what's happening all right? So I start at the end and I'm just going to put in some bass leaf way if we can find you guys all you're all feeling super good about this all right? You know, maybe we'll just start by showing you how to add too much so I like to take the paper on the edge of my table and run it down again because it'll start to create an actual leaf shape without, like, folding it, increasing it. So I will do that until I get the shape of the leaf that I want, and then I also want that curve in the inside, so I'll just start kind of playing with it without pushing really hard, and then if you really want a curl, you can take, like, a pencil or a paintbrush edge and start to run it just where you want that extra little sheep to it. So now you can see, we're really like starting to get a really belief shape, and then when I mount it, I mounted by one edge to the other. So it's not just hanging on here, and I use the glue hot glue, and we go right in there, and then I'll push it up, depending on how fat and how much I want the garland to stick out and mounted on, and it takes a lot of just sort of playing around with the arrangement. You can copy that when exactly, that will save you a lot of terri, um, I'm not doing that missing leave, but after that, I just start talking things in and pushing things to the shape that I want them to be, so in this case, because this leaf is going down, I want this one to kind of go up to create that swag feel so I know I need my curb to be like this, so then I will run it along the table to get that curve and not shave, and I'll kind of play with it a little bit and a lot of times I love the corner just to come back out a little bit. So now you see that shape we're creating, you know, I'm just going to get an idea where we want that to kind of tuck under, and the nice thing about hot glue is, you know, you have a minute or two to get it to where you want it to now, this one really comes off the edge so it's harder to get that shape, so I'm gonna mostly do it by folding, and then I'll just mount the edge up just a little. Okay, now, let's show our holly leaf that we started to work on so the holly leaf again, it has this sort of shape right here, and I want to create that with it and you can see that we did that there, and so the way I usually do that is by using a bullet folder, which we don't have, so we're going to just use the edge, and I'm just running right over that line. And can you see how it's it's already starting to sort of curve the paper and I can see the line in the back so I might even run it through on the back a little bit? It just started getting that shape, and then I'm gonna curve it back in, and I'm just going to twist each of these and kind of different directions to give it a riel holly leaf feel and so it's all about just sort of shaping them in the way that you would actually see them in nature, and I would obviously finish painting, all right? So we've started creating some depth and some dimension, but we want to keep adding it in, so we are going tio see don't thought right in there, and then instead of mounting onto the board, I'm going to be going on to the one below. So right in here, and the nice thing about hot glue is because it takes a few minutes to dry, you have a few minutes to sort of slide it around and play with it let's, hold that up so you can see how it's really starting to sort of take shape, and we're just arranging as he would a riel floral arrangement, and so we're going to keep, like, adding in things here there as we create more and more depth. But before we do that, I do want to show you how to put the flower together, so for the flower, it naturally starts to curve up already because of the wet court edges so that's, really nice, and we want to go with that and use that. So I'm just going to continue curling it up into the centre, and we'll just keep going around it to create that depth and dimension that we want on. Really, when I'm doing this again, I'm breaking the fibers on the paper to give it that curved feel. Ok, so this I just want to be pretty simple. I wanted to have some death, but not a whole lot in the actual thing. It is pretty flat I would again paint around the edge of this so we have that texture, but I left it almost completely flat. The only difference is I really wanted it to have some depth. I wanted it to stick out a little bit from the center, so what I did was I'm gonna cut from a riel phone poor board, but I wouldn't do that. I just took some pieces of foam core board and just cut them and the nice thing. I keep saying the nice thing but the nice thing about the poem for board is it's really light so it makes it really easy to hang on your mantle erred hang on your wall with just three m hooks because of how light it is so I'm just taking that I'm gonna do glue on both sides putting it in the center and then I mounting the center of our flour and I might do one more piece so it's completely level that it gives it that shading that we're looking for we're going to add this and right on top and then underneath we would start adding all of our individual pedals and we want those to be flat on the hour and we didn't cut out all of them but we will know those on no no if you knew this but if you accidentally make a mistake with hot glue you can get hot again and take it off so just usually what I would do is just take the end of my logan get hot and wipe it off this is a low temps so it's not I'm not bringing myself when I touch it make sure that you are using a low attempt but we just go all the way around with those teardrops and now we've created our central center flower again with these I would just start adding them in here and there wherever I wanted that extra depth and if I need it cut the wire I can or a lot of times I'll just create a base to hot glue so again has a bigger base to glue from and we would just keep mounting those and whatever you do on the right side you want to do it on the left side too so that it will match as well and then with shapes like this these to me are like extra adan's it's like adding a pick a floral pick onto your christmas tree so wherever I have extra space and maybe a little bit of the board is showing I'm going to tuck that in here and there so let's let's look at our final one and you can see that we have lined all of them with the different shades of green we went darker on the lighter and then lighter on the darker hear that it just a little bit of blue paint to the edges of this because it has that teal and I wanted to accent that and then the last thing we have to do is to create our other tulip flowers and we have templates for those as well and so we will make that was really quickly because I want to show you how we layered those so using the templates that air provided you you're going tio create a little tulip shape and then the circles that go inside here we go and I made this flower with really flat card stock, so this is a piece that definitely needed aa lot of painting to give it the depth and mention because it doesn't have the texture on it already, so what we do just lined it up and we're going to cut our template and you'll notice actually that a lot of the leaves have like, a little bit of a stone this one does too and that she's so I can hawk liu so I have the extra place if I need to just blew right from the edge to tuck it under something else again, I'm not doing this perfectly I don't want tio I want each piece to be different one of a kind, so we cut our two up shape and then what we need to do is to cut the pieces that go on the inside, so those three pieces are just basically blobby circles again, but what I did is it's one template and one is going to go on the outside one's going to go on the outside so I just simply lined it up like that and then trimmed off the bottom so it doesn't show so you don't have to like get it perfect at all that was my temple it's not going to cut, but you would just cut that off of the base and then to add the fringe we're using the same brown card stock so from the same sheet that we created our little pine cone and this is exactly the same is the seed pod I just did three layers and twisted it an addendum right on top of each other so we're just going to take that same brown and we're just going to come in and fringe it again I only need a little keys and then we just I like to kind of like did it and play with it a little bit so it gives the texture and I would probably do it actually a lot so it's really went in there and then that just gets layered and below so we've created are like tiny little tulips and that is it so we would just tuck those in with our leaf as well and you can kind of see why did the stunned because we can it tucks in under other items and I would go to the to the right I would make all the leaves go into the right into the left and mccall believes go to the left and that is our floral garland so it it looks complicated everyone will come in in new and all that really it's tracing and cutting and painting around the edges of things what is really cool is if you wanted to continue it and go all the way down the edges of your mantle. You could easily do that. Instead of using the foam core board, I would just start mounting it, like leaf by leaf. So it has a movement, just like a real garland would. But across the top, I wanted it nice and stuff. So it wasn't like flopping over and hanging down.