Scrapbook Flowers

Written and Created by PaperCraftCentral Susan

Make some scrapbook flowers out of felt, paper, crepe paper and buttons today.

"When you have only two pennies left in the world,
buy a loaf of bread with one, and a lily with the other."
~Chinese Proverb

Make yourself some Unique Scrapbook Flowers out of lots of different materials

Making our own embellishments is sometimes the best way to obtain the very thing you want for a special page in your album. You can customise the size, shape, material, colour and even type of flower to create.

If you have a few basic shaped paper punches and dies, or have a few basic hand sewing skills and scraps, you can make your own flowers to use on your scrapbook pages and beyond. Even complex dies make flower building quite an easy task!

I also use these types of flowers on my handmade greeting cards, to dress up little boxes, to gift wrap and just about any other place you would like to add a handmade flower!

Here's an example of the Artful Amaryllis dies used to make a card from Stampin' Up!

You can be quite hands on with making flowers with whatever you have in your house, if you are already a crafter or sewer. It isn't too expensive to buy a few pieces of felt and material remnants if you want to use fabric, or look for paper scraps in your stash to create your flowers.You will need a skein of embroidery cotton and a sewing needle as well as your fabric scissors.

At a scrappy day at my house, I got together with a few friends and an Embossing and Cutting Machine, some felt, some cardstock, some crepe paper, a needle and embroidery cotton and some buttons to make these flowers pictured below.

These flowers were all inspired by Chelle Bean Designs, yet all of them turned out to be quite different from one another depending on who made them.

The top five flowers were made with crepe paper and buttons with some florist's wire.

Here's how we made them:

We folded strips of crepe paper into accordion pleats and put several layers together. Then we threaded buttons onto wire and fixed our crepe paper in the middle. Finally we teased out the different layers of crepe to make a flower.

The round flowers that are more or less in the middle of the picture were made by punching out circles from designer series paper and cardstock. (You can use a compass and pencil to create your own cardboard disc to trace around instead of using a die cutting machine. Then use your cardboard template to cut our paper and fabric circles).

We then distressed the edges of the paper and hand stitched various sized circles together with buttons and embroidery thread.

The last blossoms pictured were made with die cut flower and circle shapes. This time we used felt to make our shapes, then stitched around the circles with embroidery cotton before layering them together with a flower shape and a button.

We could have used many other materials to make our blooms. We thought of using

• cork, 
• thin metals and foils, 
• tissue paper, 
• coffee filters, 
• thin leather, 
• grungeboard, c
• orrugated cardboard, 
• acrylic, 
• satins...the list was really as endless as our imaginations.

It was a lot of fun to make so many different types of flowers out of so many different materials. The company was good, too! ☺

That's another thing I love about papercrafting. I love the people you meet with similar interest who become your friends.It really is a lovely, warm community in the crafting world, for the most part!

I hope you get to spend time with crafty friends, trying out new ideas over a cuppa and a chat. It's a great way to spend a morning or a whole day if you can. But you can use these ideas to make your flowers on your own at home and show them off to friends later.

And if you have some more ideas for how to make your own scrapbook flowers, I hope you will share them here.

Next time we have a scrappy day, we would love to have some new ideas to try out!

I may use your ideas on PaperCraftCentral as well, if you share them with me.

Just take a photo or two and tell me a little about your flowers - did you use them in a scrapbook? Did making them yourself make a difference to how you felt about your completed project?

If you enjoyed reading about scrapbook flowers and trying out some of the ideas, you may like to explore some more flower making tutorials:

• tiny white flowers
• giant paper flowers
  
• paper rosebuds
• how to make paper flowers
• More ideas for making paper flowers
  

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