The headline will read "Beautiful Centerpieces from $5 to $500," said the magazine's style editor to me, "and we want you to design the $5 model for our readers." Now designing expensive projects is easy; exquisite papers, elaborate designs, and a lot of time (all of which translates into a lot of money) are all you need to create something beautiful. Pulling off the same effect with only five bucks and a few simple steps is many times harder. The challenge was right up my alley.
Since the price point would be modest, I decided to try my hand at making some paper daisies, those most humble of field flowers. The materials list was extremely modest:
1. Paper (I used pieces from my paper scraps pile: textured and smooth pink and white-on-white, as well as long, narrow, strips for the flower centers)
2. Hot glue gun with glue sticks
3. A craft knife
4. A circle template (I used an upside-down drinking glass)
5. Floral wire and green floral tape for making the daisy stems
I loved the results so much I kept at it, coming up with a handful of options for the editor to choose from. In the end, the magazine decided to print a number of my designs in their story. Unfortunately, this one—one of my favorites—never made it into those pages but I thought I'd share it with you here. If the response to this is good, I'll feature, in an upcoming post, one of the designs that actually made it into print. They were really gorgeous so, please let me know if you want to see more of this sort of thing.
Perfect Paper Daisies
Begin with a circle of paper cut to the overall dimension you want your daisies to be. I used an inverted water glass with a 3-inch mouth as my cutting template. Cut two (2) circles for EACH bloom you intend to make.
A drinking glass provided the cutting template. Pick a size circle that best suits your purposes. Two-inch circles will make the flowers look more precious while five-inch circles will add impact. (Be sure your paper is stiff enough to maintain its shape if you opt for making the larger blossoms.)
Next, make eight (8) cuts as indicated in the illustration below. Each cut is about 1 inch long.
Since this project was intended to be both easy and low-cost, I tried to create something that could be done like an assembly line. This set of cuts can be done on 3–6 disks at once, making it a very fast project to complete.
Next, fold each petal in half, lengthwise, as indicated by the dashed lines in the illustration below. There is no need to pre-score these folds since the added time and effort do not significantly improve the results. Just a simple crease will suffice.
By modifying the manner in which you crease these pieces, you can achieve a great deal of variation in the final results. Try soft creases or partical creases at just the tips or even hand-shaping each petal to enhance the organic look of your own flowers.
Once you've finished creasing one disk, simply repeat these first three steps with all of your remaining disks. Blossoms are created by layering two (2) disks, one on top of the other, and affixing them with a dot of hot glue. Be sure to align them in such a way as to allow the petals on the bottom to peak through between the petals on the top.
The key to the success of these pieces is their great texture and dimension, which is achieved through simple folds and layering.
For the centers of each flower, I simply took a narrow strip of yellow or pink paper about 1/8 inch x 18 inches, and wound it into a tight spiral disk and glued it in place. I finished each flower by affixing it to a length of floral wire with hot glue, and then wrapping the stems with green floral.
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