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Crate Paper Flower Varieties

Now at this point we're not going to fluff up the pedals quite yet because we want to add our greenery to these and so this is how we're going to do that you've all got some lovely green crepe paper in front of you again I mentioned that most of these folds or about four inches apart I am going to go about an inch down there's really it's not exact and cut a strip over to the first fold so I would guess to mate this is about four inches by one inch I'm then going to go back to my pinking shears I'm going to fold this piece of paper and a half a couple of times I find that I've got better control when I take a larger strip and want to create a straight line if I fold it in half folded in half again and then I'm going to cut a little zigzag there across the top and this piece even though it may not look long look long enough will be plenty long for both of the little flowers that we've just created so essentially what you're going to be doing is taking one of the blossoms they've created...

hold your paper that you've just cut the green paper pick what side you'd like to be the exterior if you're working with the double sided crepe paper kind of position and you're going to want this zigzag edge to be just maybe on eighth of an inch above the wire it's what's going to disguise it wrap it all the way around get an idea of how long that needs to be give yourself about a quarter of an inch for overlap and snip that strip now taking a little bit of white glue our white tacky glue I'm going to squeeze some of this out here I find when I'm working with these really sort of diminutive scale flowers it's easier for me to squeeze out a little bit of glue and apply it with a toothpick so I'm just going to use my toothpick here and I'm going to go in and I'm going to apply dots of it all along the wire you I've got a big job there but you really want to try and be a little minimal you'll be surprised at how little of the glue you need in order for the crepe paper to securely stick together so I'm just going along the wire that is securing the pedals together once I've done that I'm going to take my piece of green crepe paper again I'm gonna position that zigzag edge just about an eighth of an inch above the floral wire that have just covered in glue and I'm going to hold it in place with my thumb for just a second to allow it to hold and then with just a little bit of tension I'm going to pull and wrap this green crepe paper all of the way around the bloom if you can see we've got our open flap here so what I want to do is I want to secure that in place so again putting a little bit of glue on a toothpick I'm going to spread it down that open edge of the green crepe paper strip folded over and just press that down into place very lightly it'll you'll see it just grabs right onto the opposing sheet and you can see that it hangs down quite a ways which is good that's what we want um set that aside for second give it just a moment to dry and we're going to head over to our second blossom and do the exact same thing so again I'm taking a little bit of glue on the end of my toothpick I am applying it along the edges of the wire that wraps around the blossom holding all those pedals in place returning to my green crepe paper strip positioning that zigzag edge just about an eighth of an inch above my wire holding in place for just a moment with my thumb allowing it to hold and secure and then with just a little bit of tension I'm going to begin wrapping it around and this creates a natural looking portion of your flower but also with the double duty of disguising the wire that we're using to construct it so once you've wrapped it all the way around you've got that open end again a little bit of glue on your toothpick and run it along that strip and gently press it down into place don't get set that down and just allow that to drive for a moment now we're in the home stretch with these guys and one thing that we're going to want to do is now take some of our green prate crepe paper cut strips to wrap down that stem to bring it all together and give it that sort of life like look so to do that I'm taking my piece of green crepe paper I'm folding it back up the way the original fold wass and I'm taking just a pair of regular shears and I'm going to cut a strip across all the way down that somewhere between a quarter and a half inch I would air more on the side of narrow for this and cut a couple of those you open it up you can see it's considerably long we may or may not use all of this will just cut off the excess that we don't need now this next step will definitely take a little bit of practice so if you don't conquer it the first time around don't worry about it but you can see this little cuff we've created around the bottom of the flower we're going to sort of pinch it together towards the center of the stemming just gather that together, you can see what that looks like there and then in order to hold that in place and to combine it with our stem, I'm going to take my strip of paper again with a little dot of glue on the end of my tooth pick I'm just adding a small amount to the strip, but I'm taking my flower I'm pressing this down and I'm putting I'm applying it below the pedal line so that's, why we've got this great cuff because it gives us that transition from the pedals down to the narrower base and pinching in place and with some gentle tension and you'll find the crepe paper has great stretch I'm going to wrap it around a couple of times and already you can see it is pulling all of that greenery together now at this stage of the game, here's the little bit of a tricky part we're going to attempt to change angle slightly and what I'm going to do is sort of bend my crepe paper down and I want to do this because I want to now begin wrapping down the stem, so this is sort of a process of I'm using my left hand too slowly rotate the flower well with my right hand, I'm adding a little bit of tension and wrapping it down now I have seen some um paper flower artists that have done this and they've got this step down and they can zip down a stem in no time take your time doing it the first couple of times you will eventually get there it's one of those things that you really just want to allow yourself to practice and perfect, but you can kind of find that you get some great coverage is you're wrapping it down if it's a little bit lumpy, forgive yourself, it's. All right? You've got multiple ones to practise on and these really are the first time you're doing this. So when my papers very sturdy, but if you were to tell you if you were committed here that's a great question you would just glue that piece in place, put a little bit more glue on the other tornado and and keep galadriel is very forgiving. Yeah, once you get down to the end, then you're just going to kind of snip it off, apply a little bit more glue and secure that in place and we'll set this fella aside and let it dry for a moment and go on to our second bloom and do that as well. So again, you can see I've got the second one with this longer cuff piece pinching it in towards the center, gathering all of that crepe paper in towards the wire stem continuing with actually my same strip that I was working on with the previous one applying a little bit of glue on the end positioning it below the petals where all of the greenery sort of has gathered around the stem pressing into place and again with a little bit attention that's really the trick with this it helps it's sort of stick together and cling more tightly to the wire we're going to wrap it around a few times and as I said before going to change angle a little bit of this point it's almost a little bit of a forty five degree angle and I'm going to start working my way down the stem pretending I'm ambidextrous twisting it with one hand and slightly pulling in rapping with the other how we doing in the audience are you guys doing all right with this? I know it's a little tricky but I know you all are also a little crafty so all right when you get down to the ends sleeping it off and buying a little bit of glue so I'm going to set that aside and we've got the basis of our first two flowers, which is pretty fantastic now to add a little foliage on to these guys for this particular variety, I've kind of taken sort of visual clues from uh, carnations who have those lovely long blade like leaves and these are actually very simple if you take one end of your crepe paper just sort of folded over about a half of an inch and then cut two creates a long folded strip, this is likely far more paper than you will need um but what I'm going to do then you can see I've got this long strip, I'm gonna fold that in half and I'm going to do two things, so I'm going to open this back up just to see what happened. It's, a long strip it's folded in half, it's folded in half again, I'm going to take my shears and I'm going to snip the end into a little bit of a gothic point here, so it's a little bit rounded and it comes up to a point in the centre cnc along those lines, and then one of my edges is still folded, so I'm going to trim up that to free up the flower free of thea the pedals and you can at this point, sort of play around with the width of your pedal. I feel like I want mine to be a little bit narrower, so I'm going to trim it up on the other side as well and then snippet at the bottom and you can see what you've done is you've created for blade like petals um, in order to apply, these two are flower um I usually tend to stick with the color that I used to wrap the stem as the portion of the leaf that faces up I'm going to take a little bit of my glue on the edge of a toothpick spread it along the bottom there and then I'm just going to pick up random points along my stem I'm gonna lay the stem on top of it and just sort of roll that excess paper at the bottom of the leaf around it and pinch it into place but what of the other used floral tape which of course is pre you know what I have used floral tape and I'll tell you why a tend to stick with the crepe paper it comes in a nice nicer range of colors but it's ah also the floral tape tends to get really sticky and gummy andi I find that I've got a little bit more control when I'm using just the crepe paper by itself so once you've got that first leaf on there you can see it just stands straight up we want to give that a little dimension and a little curl so in order to do that I'm going to take the blade of my scissors and very gently run it along the back side this is almost as if you were treating it is curling ribbon when you're wrapping a package and you can see it just kind of very gracefully curls it back, and at that point, then you can go in and fluff up the top of your floral of the pedals just want to just take your finger and just start to bend those pedals back, creating a little bit fuller bloom. Now, if you're doing multiples of these and a little bit of a bow ok again, it's it's nice sometimes to have some flowers that are open a little wider and some that are closed a little tighter just to give it some variation you could see that looks quite looks quite nice. So how are we feeling in the studio audience? I know this is a lot in rapid fire pace. You all are keeping up like champs. Thank you. Looks good. And then I'm very quickly going to just apply the second leaf and we need to jump on to our second variety. This is paper flower boot camp, my friends. I really like this crepe paper. Isn't it lovely. Just so you know what it's called again. Name of it d o u b l e t t e do play. Um, I'm sure, though, if you were to type into a search engine, just double sided crepe paper or dual colored crepe paper, it would come up a cz well list of silver it is on a list of materials that's a great question it's another great reason toe have that list of materials so that when you go back to tackle these projects, you will have everything you need. All right, my friends we've done variety number one we are immediately going to jump into variety number two and for this next flower variation, I want to show you how to create one this is along the lines of a trumpet flower so it's got it's almost a cz if it were the center perhaps of a daffodil, daffodils would just have the added addition obviously, of the additional petals along the side. But for this variety, we're going to be working with this really beautiful um sort of coral salmon colored paper and what we're going to do for this is we're going to measure down a strip of paper that is two by four inches. So again a reminder that most of these folds air about four inches and with we're going to take our pencils and make a very light two inch mark on either end you want to draw a little cutting guideline can do that we'll take our regular pair of shears this time there's no pinking shears involved in this particular flower variety we'll cut out that strip once you have cut out that two by four strip, we're going to fold it in half and we're going to cut it along the fold creating basically too two by two pieces and let's just set one of those pieces aside this would be enough to create two flowers we're going to focus on just one at the moment so take that piece and folded in half again and then taking your paris scissors were going to cut a little bit of a scalloped top now sometimes I find it helpful when I'm doing this to simply take my pencil and draw the little scallops so I've got a guideline to follow and typically on this scale you can get about three scallops across when you folded the paper and taking my paris scissors I'm just going to trim along that line no need to worry about perfection with these scallops if it's a regular they're still going to look great when you open it back up then you see that you haven't upper edge with six lovely scallops. One thing I am going to do is take my pair of scissors and cut a slight slit between each of my scallops that is roughly about an eighth to a quarter of an inch deep now one technique that you often find when working with crepe paper is a process called cupping and basically what that is is taking a crepe paper between your thumbs and giving it a little stretch and it basically it will kind of cut up the paper a slight amount and this is really where you start to get into some of the sculptural possibilities of crepe paper you really see how when you do this, it holds it for holds its form. Now, obviously, when we're doing it on these teeny tiny scallops, it's not as dramatic as it is or is visible is it will be when we work on the lower portion of this bloom to kind of balloon it out a little bit, but once you've done that all on the edge, if you catch that there it's just a little bit cupped on each of those scallops. Now we're going to do the same thing about halfway down the strip of paper starting at one end, we're going to slowly give it a little stretch and you kind of see immediately it starts to almost curl that paper up and what's what that is doing it helps create sort of this ballooned portion of the trumpet flower all rights now to create are sort of tubular shaped flower. We're going to return to our trustee toothpick and tacky glue, and we're just going to apply a very small amount all along one edge and don't do it all the way up to the top of the scallop, maybe start right below the scallop and work it all the way down to the straight edge of the paper. Once you've done that, we're going to roll it around on your finger and overlap the two sides, I would say roughly about an eighth to half of an inch are to a quarter of an inch you may want tio stick your finger down in through the scalloped ends in kind of like pinch that seem closed, but again, you will find that the tacky glue hold it pretty securely. How we doing, everybody good? All right, okay, we've created the basis for our trumpet flower. We're going to set that side momentarily grab your beautiful piece of canary yellow paper, and we're going to cut a narrow strip that is about a half inch by four inches, so again to one of the folds, and you'll find with these crate papers, especially if you're working on this scale, one full fold is going to create a lot of projects for you. I'm taking the strip now, and I'm just folding it in half a couple of times because I want to then take my shears and again create a serious of fringe, uh, from one side, about three quarters of the way down. So I'm starting at one end doing a sniff about three quarters of the way down, and I'm doing that about every eighth of an inch now, um in my mind, it would make sense to use those fringing shears with this, but I have found quite honestly, they do not work well with the crepe paper they tend to get thie paper tends to get gummed up between all of those multiple blades, and it really does not do what you want it to d'oh. Once you've done that, we're going to take again one of our eighteen inch floral wire stems, and we're going to fold that in half and cut it in half again, then we're going to take that half if folded in half again, but not cutting this one in half. You're going to take your lovely fringe strip and we're not going to gather it up in quite the same way we did on our first version, where we were sort of crimping and pinching it as we went around, we're going to allow this one to sit a little bit flatter because what we're doing with this is really just creating the stamen for our flour, so I'm going to take the hooked edge again and I'm going to fold it down about three pedals in and I'm just going to start rolling it around, and this time I'm really I'm just wrapping it around this stem, I'm not pinching, I'm not twisting it's, just a gentle, rolling motion. And when you get to the end at a little bit of glue to secured in place on the end of the stem, pinch it down and just hold it for just a second to allow that glue to set up, but you can see what you've done is you've created this sort of really lovely, tightly wound fringed center stamen for flowers, okay, we'll set that aside for a moment and allow that to dry. We're going to jump back to our green paper if you've got some strips left over from, um, the stem from the first variety, we're going to go ahead and use those and what's gonna happen here is this. We're going to take the lovely statement you just created. We're going to feed it down through the top of our fluted form, and we're going to gather the base of the fluted flower, right it's below the stamen. So at this point, the stamen is bottom of it is right about here, so I've pulled it all the way down into the flour, but not to the bottom of my beautiful salmon colored paper. I'm pinching it right below that bundle got that my guys are all concentrating so hard, I love it, okay, once you've done that, we're going to take the end of our green crepe paper strip. Again deciding which side green you want to face out I think this time around I'm going toe put the four screen on the interior and have the kelly green facing out so I'm going to apply a little bit of glue along that strip and then very similar to what we did before I'm going to position the strip right on top of the base of that flower allowed to sit for just one moment to settle up and then I'm going with a little bit attention wrap that crepe paper straight around a couple of times and don't be overly concerned with the shape of your trumpet flour at the moment because we're going to tweak that in just a second but once you've wrapped it around a couple of times again we're going to do our little tricky changing the angle of our strip and we're going to slowly start wrapping it down the stem again I am I am right handed so I am twisting it with my left hand and I'm pulling the stripped down with a little bit attention with my right hand wrapping it all the way down the stem when you get to the bottom can you're just gonna snip off that little bit of excess apply a little bit of glue and secure that in place now in order to adjust the shape of your trumpet the's air a couple of things that you can dio one is to bend the little scalloped tops back a little bit this is going to open it up feel it make it feel a little bit more lifelike and it's also going to give you a view of that beautiful canary yellow center that we created now if you feel like it's a little flatter on the sides that need like you can always kind of stick your pinkie down and beside the stamen and push the sides out a little bit to help it kind of get that balloons shape around the sides but then you find it looks very similar to the other ones we made earlier well done guys. Nice. Very nice. Ok, very quickly then I want to show you how to create the variety of leaves to go with these guys and what we're doing arm or traditional leaf shape. So for this one this is really a matter of you sort of uh you're just gonna eyeball this one so I'm simply cutting out a peace that is what is that? Maybe about an inch and a half by two inches kind of idea folding in half not unlike how we cut out our leaves for our giant paper flowers yeah, you along the grain are a very good question you will notice with all of the crepe paper that it has a very distinct grain along one side and when the grain runs up and down you're able to stretch it when you pull with the grain, it does not stretch, so when you're constructing that's always a great thing to have in mind, we're going to be cutting, so the grain is vertical, so you're going to fold along the grain and have it go in that direction again. Once it's folded, we're going to cut it very similar to how we did for our giant paper flowers, just kind of in a beautiful teardrop shape. As such, we're going to go back to our floral wire, stems, take the other half of the piece that we had used earlier, folded in half this time, we are going to cut it, so you're ending up with a piece that really is just a quarter of the length of where it originally started, and what we're going to do here is take the end of your floral wire and apply a little bit of glue to it. I would say about three quarters of an inch down you then going to take that end of the wire with the glue, and you're going to sandwiches on the face of c I'm working on this side, aren't I? Sorry had to adjust there for a moment, because I remember that I was working with the kelly green side up for this particular flower, I'm taking the glued and of the floral wire pressing it down into the center and I'm just going to fold it in half and pinch it in place so essentially I've just folded that wire right into the center of the leaf and when you open it up obviously the bottom part of your leaf has it here to one another and it kind of creates this beautiful little gather in the center all right? And then is the crowning touch on this guy we're going to return tio one of our little green paper strips and we're going to cover the wire below the leaf you can see that I'm creating this leaf separate from the stem of the flower and uh, the method behind the madness on that one is that we're going to then be able to use this when we create our lovely boot nears in the next session and it's a little bit nice to have that separate so for this, you can position your strip sorry, guys, I keep forgetting what side of the green I'm working with let me apply it on the right side because I want the kelly green sticking out trend that off applying it around. All right? So you've got your leaf on the end of the stem I'm applying the strip just below it and really just gathering it around as we've done previously on all of our floral stems and wrapping it down this one, because we are just dealing with a single wire versus the two it's, obviously thinner. And you might need to allow yourself to pinch the floor. A pinch. The crepe paper a little bit tighter around the wire as you wrap all the way down to the bottom. All right. Snipping it at the end, playing an eighty but a bit of glue and pinching it in place. And so what you now have is you've got this lovely leaf at the end of ah, flexible stem, which makes it perfect for when you're putting together arrangements or small bouquets. Because it gives you a lot of flexibility and how you position the flowers. And the obviously, because they are on wire, will stay in whatever position you position them.