{paper + straw flower tutorial // guest post}

My sweet friend Heather is here today to share a super fun + easy tutorial for making paper flowers. So perfect, because today is Valentine’s Day and these would be perfect on the table for when your sweetie arrives home ♥. Other places I’m loving them: on the dresser in your daughter’s bedroom, to pretty up a bathroom, or on your nightstand. Happy Valentine’s Day, and thanks so much Heather for sharing your talents with us! xoxo

Hi, I’m Heather Dawn from Just Lovely Things and I love sharing fun and easy tutorials with the readers of my blog.  I can’t keep all the fun to myself over there though, so when I came up with this bright and cheerful project I knew that it would be perfect over here at Gussy Sews!

This tutorial is easy and only requires a couple of supplies, for the paper I used wrapping paper which is super thin and comes in an endless amount of prints.  Book pages also work wonderful for this and the bendy straws are easy to use since they are adjustable and you can snip the ends for varying lengths.

First up you need to cut your pattern into your paper for the flowers (or clouds like mine turned out!). To do this cut your paper into strips then down into squares about 3×5.  If you want to trace a template by all means do, but they aren’t meant to be perfect petals so free handing is just fine.

Next cut an ‘X’ into your shape by lightly bending in half one way – snip it then fold the other way and – snip again.  This is where you will be placing the straw through your paper.

Place your shape (print side up) onto your bendy straw where you would sip from to just the point where the bend starts, you dont want to go to far onto it or past it because you want to be able to adjust those flowers.  Next take a couple pieces of tape and secure the paper to the straw.

Now take as many pieces as you want of the paper and stack them print side up.  I used 4-6 per flower, but you can use more if you want something fuller plus you can cut different sized shapes if you want them to be larger or smaller!

Carefully holding the bottom of the flower (where you previously taped) gather the top piece of paper as if you were pinching/gathering around the reminder of the straw that is sticking out.  Tape around the base of that section.  It will look like the middle photo.  Now you just take all your layers starting from the top and working down and just sorta of scrunch them together, be careful not to pull… you just want them gathered!

When you are done you will see a small piece of straw sticking out… snip that off & if you get nervous like me, then just put another piece of tape in there to secure it!  Voila! Super cute, easy and adjustable flowers that will stay pretty all year round!  I think this would even be cute if you used tissue paper for your flowers, made them smaller and left the tip of the straw on to use as party sippy straws! <--- ohhh the ideas are a flowin'!!!

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Aren’t they lovely??! Make sure you send some love to Heather below by leaving a comment! Be sure to see what else she’s up to online here + here.