Crepe Paper Bouquet

Hello once more, friends. This post has taken a while due to the tragedy of me losing the cord that connects my camera to my computer! Luckily, just as I typed those words, I remembered where I had left it. So huzzah for that. Now I'm going to stop writing for a moment so I can actually upload and sort the images.

. . .
Back!
So, as you may know, earlier this month some young man and I got engaged. The wedding's over a year away, but that's no reason to put off the DIY elements that will keep. So, for the last two weeks I've been shopping around to figure out what is worth the cost to buy and not have to worry about, and what would be easy to make myself. When I got around to looking at floral arrangements, I decided the universe was just messing with me. Seriously, $100 for a simple bouquet I would use once in my life? Seriously? So, like any crafter, I started looking around for ways I could make this happen without investing in ready-made.

First, I looked at tutorials for arranging bouquets. This tutorial and video on theknot.com, a site with lots of great wedding resources DIY and otherwise, was my favorite. But then, I ran across something I had never heard of, although now I see that it's rather a common project- crepe flowers! Martha Stewart has a great tutorial up on making very realistic crepe flowers, but I was really inspired by this Mother's Day Corsage tutorial, which incorporates painting the flowers to add color variety. So I set out to combine the beautiful, articulated petals of Martha Stewart's creations with the depth and detail of painted crepe. Here's what happened.

Crepe Paper Bouquet

Materials:
Crepe streamers in petal color and stem/leaf color

scissors

wire cutters

20 gauge floral wire

acid-free glue stick

gouache paints

paintbrushes, size and shape depending on what you want to do with your flowers

water for mixing with gouache and cleaning your brushes

palette or plate or something for holding/mixing your paint

Optional:

plastic bag to cover your paint-space

coffee

Star Trek: DS9 on netflix as background entertainment

Since there are a few steps to this project that tend to spread out, you'll want a work space that's free to be taken over by this project for a while. Like this.

To start a flower, fold one end of your crepe paper over about 1.125" - 1.25", then continue folding it in a flat roll 20 times. Now cut that flat roll into your desired petal shape, making sure to leave the bottom ~.25" of the petals connected at either side. The aforementioned Martha Stewart tutorial has some good petal ideas, but unless you're going for total realism, I would use them as ideas and not strict rules.

Now unroll your petals. The ones that were furthest inside the roll might need a bit of extra shaping, so go ahead and do that now.

Time to play with paint! If you're wanting your flowers to look more real, go ahead and google whatever type of flower you're making and see what sort of color variations happen in nature. I noticed three color schemes that I really liked and used for the three flower types I tried: a lighter color at the center/base of the petal, a darker color at the center/base of the petal, and a color edging the petal.

Gouache is my paint of choice for this because it is as easy as or even easier to use than regular water colors. Use water to thin it out a bit on your palette, and have fun mixing the tones. For my roses, I made half-circles of an interesting mix of bright yellow, flat gold, and light salmon at the base of the petals. My carnations received creamy white edges around each petal. I painted thin, bruised-purple lines up from the base of my quasi-dahlia petals. You can also mix colors down to a thin consistency and use them to tint your petals so that each flower isn't identical to the next, or to make your flowers a better color match to another decoration.
When your petal strips have completely dried, it's time to assemble your flowers. Begin by cutting your floral stems down to a manageable size if necessary. Then, bend about a half inch over 180 degrees at one end. This gives your flower a larger area to glue onto than just the straight end of a wire. With 22 gauge wire, I didn't even need pliers to make this bend.

Now run your glue stick along the bottoms of the first two petals and wrap them around the bent end of the wire. Continue applying glue to the petal bases one or two at a time and layering them around the flower. If your crimp and pleat the bases as you go, this will help your petals fan out a bit, so your flowers won't all be tight buds.

To cover your stems so that they aren't bare wire, cut a length of crepe about 1.5x the length of your wire. If you don't like the color of the crepe, take a moment to tint it with your gouache and let it dry completely. Now fold an end of your stem crepe so that two inches or so of it are pointing 90 degrees away from the rest. Cover the crease with your glue stick.

Roll the crease around the base of your flower, making sure to let the two inch end stick out above the rest of the crepe, as this will be your leaf. Continue wrapping and twisting the long end around your wire. Crepe likes to stick to itself well enough that, aside from the top crease, you probably won't need any glue to hold the rest of your stem crepe in place. When you reach the bottom of your wire, just pinch or cut off any excess crepe. Cut the leaf-end into a leaf-shape and you have a beautiful, unique, painted crepe flower!