Paper Flower Wreath

I am obsessed with this project! I love love flowers and my poor little bare door needed a colorful wreath for the summer.  Can you believe how real and beautiful these paper flowers look? And, bonus, they are easy easy easy to make.  Like I kind of felt like a little kid making them, they were so fun.

This project is all about color! One of my favorite sites is design-seeds.com and it's a great resource for color palettes when you're making anything.  This was the color palette inspiration I used for my wreath. There are millions of gorgeous combinations to help you get inspired in making your wreath.

Paper Flower Wreath

For this project you'll need: tissue paper in various colors, floral wire or pipe cleaners, scissors, paint and paintbrush (optional--I used gouache but you could use acrylic or anything), and floral tape.  

So there are about a billion different kinds of paper flowers you can make, I will just show you how to make a few types that I used in my wreath.  One tip: do NOT get caught up in worrying about making these flowers perfect, I dripped paint on a few of them, cut wonky shapes from the tissue paper, smashed a few flowers a little bit and they still all looked amazing.  Just have fun with it!

This is the basis for all of the flowers I made for my wreath.  Just a length of floral wire (about 9-ish inches) with a small square of tissue paper folded in half over the middle.  Then roll the square of tissue paper up so that it is tight on the wire (it definitely doesn't need to look pretty, just roll it tight and be good with it!) Then fold the wire in half. Ta-da! You have a center for a paper flower!

The process for all of these flowers is the exact same:

1. Cut out your shapes from tissue paper, and grab a length of floral wire.
2. Paint the tissue paper if desired, it looks really cool to use a dry-ish brush with paint and brush outward from the center.  
3. Make the flower's stem and center using the instructions above.
4. Stack your flower pieces up and poke them onto the stem.  Slide them all the way to the top so they are snug against the flower's center.
5. Wrap a little bit of floral tape right under the base of the petals.  This makes it so the flower petals won't slide back down the stem.
6. Crumple all of the petals to give them a more natural look (optional).

Sort of a sunflower/poppy hybrid.  To make the black flower center, cut out a small circle and then make slashes all around it to create a fringe-y look.

An anemone type flower, super super easy and it turned out being my favorite one!

My version of a carnation.  The way you achieve this painted effect is use a really dry, flat brush and dip it in a little bit of paint.  Then make short strokes outward around the edge of the circle.  This flower also has some stamen details.  This was done by taking a small rectangle of yellow tissue paper and twisting/rolling it tightly.  I then painted the tips black, and let dry.  Then pinch them in the flower's center when you fold the wire stem in half.

To make this floral bud, I used the floral tape to attach the separate petals around the center of the flower.  Just keep wrapping the floral tape around as you add the petals.

Another floral bud, same technique as above!

Look at all of the pretty flowers you've made! Loosely arrange them into how you'd like the wreath to look.

Begin to make the wreath by holding two flower stems together and wrapping them with floral tape.  Wrap a for an inch or two and then add another flower by wrapping with floral tape.  Keep adding flowers and wrapping with tape until you've come to the end.

This is how the back of the wreath will look when you've added all of your flowers.  Finish the wreath by pulling the two ends together and wrapping the raw ends (shown here on the right) back onto the first flower's stem (here on the left).  Cut the tape and you're done!

I hope everyone is having a happy, sunny Monday!