It seems dried flowers are here to stay, in more ways than one.
This is one of those trends that I wasn't really into at the beginning, but eventually got my interest a full year later. (It's like having an Ariana Grande song in your head: you find yourself singing it right when a different new single tops the charts.)
Lucky for me, dried florals and dried grass are still fresh in 2021, judging by the interior design articles that still call it the year's biggest trend. I guess people are still stuck at home and in need of low-maintenance coziness to fill their void.
So I'm halfway on-board, convinced that I want dead flowers in my home somewhere, but a few major peeves stopped me. First, store-bought dried flower bouquets are pricey, and second, most of them are frickin' imported! Like who spends that much money and burns that much fossil fuel just to transport lifeless plants from Austria?
"Fuck that, I'll make my own," I said, reaching for my stack of old brown paper bags.
Here's how that went.
Instead of going around the neighborhood picking wild grass off the side of the road, I decided to craft my own 'flowers' using old brown bags. I have piles of them, and I wanted this DIY to be as sustainable as possible. Plus, paper bags already have that dead-leaf color anyway.
From there, I just needed some glue, toothpicks, and a pair of scissors, with guest appearances from cotton balls and red food coloring (you'll find out why in the instructions below).
I made four simple kinds of dried botanicals, then arranged them all together in this old sake jar that I've had for years. And that metallic tray? That's just an old cookie tin. Yup -- buy nothing, waste nothing!
Now let's get crafting. Click on any link to jump to a specific dried flower craft:
- Paper palm leaf (serrated)
- Paper palm leaf (rounded)
- Paper cotton flowers (that look like baby's breath)
- Paper ixora flowers (jungle geraniums)
Craft 1: How to Make a Paper Palm Leaf (Serrated)
Materials: old brown paper bag, white glue, scissors, toothpick (or a chopstick, if you want a longer stem)
Step 1: Cut a solid rectangle from the brown paper. The length of this rectangle should be twice the length of your palm leaf. E.g. if you want your palm leaf to be 10cm in length, your rectangle should be 20cm long.
Step 2: Fold up the rectangle accordion style, lengthwise. Accordion folding is like making a paper fan, like below. Then fold your little accordion in half.
Step 3: With a sharp pair of scissors, cut a pointy triangular shape out of the tip of the folded paper, as shown below. You can also cut pointy tips individually at each fold instead of all at once.
Step 4: Make a tiny hole right at the central fold of the paper fan. I used scissors for this, but you can just poke a hole with a pin or thumbtack. Insert the toothpick (or chopstick) a little ways into the hole, then glue in place. Also glue together the middle edges of the folded paper.
Step 5: Almost there! Glue the bottom folds of the paper together to create a gathered base. You'll also want to lock your toothpick with a bit of glue.
Step 6: Let the glue dry completely, then spread out your pointy-tipped palm frond. As a final touch, make a small incision between each 'leaflet' to allow the frond to open up nicely.
Ta-dah! Here's your paper anahaw a.k.a. palm frond:
Craft 2: How to Make a Paper Palm Leaf (Rounded)
This one's the easiest to make. It's basically just a pointed paper fan, but I wanted to make it with reddish-brown paper to add variety to my paper bouquet. You could just make this with whatever color paper you want, though I prefer the uneven, textured result that I got with recoloring a brown piece of paper. It looks more natural, you know? So down below, you'll find a little extra step of coloring the brown paper bag material I had.
Materials: old brown paper bag, food coloring or other pigment of choice, old watercolor brush (or any throwaway brush you have), glue, scissors
Step 1: Cut a pointed oval shape out of your brown paper. It's important to cut the shape a lot wider than it is long, and to taper it to a point on the top and the bottom, as shown:
Step 2: With your pigment and brush, give the paper a tinge of color. Here, I'm using red food coloring diluted with a bit of water to achieve the red shade I want. Let the paper dry completely before proceeding to the next step.
Step 3: Fold the paper accordion-style, like making a paper fan. Glue the toothpick at the bottom, gather the folds to make a base, and glue in place:
And here it is, a super-easy paper palm leaf:
Craft 3: How to Make Paper Cotton Flowers
I've seen enough bouquets in my lifetime to know that baby's breath is the shit. My aunts and grade school teachers all liked to stuff their flower arrangements with these tiny white blossoms because they fill in shadowy gaps in the vase. And if you're dealing with neutral- or brown-colored dried flowers, you probably want a spray of daintiness on that bouquet so it doesn't look plain dead.
I found this cute video tutorial to make fake gypsophilia flowers using felt and craft wire, but I was out of felt and wanted to use brown packaging paper as stems. So here's how I adapted the steps to make 'dried' baby's breath out of paper.
Materials: old brown paper bag, a cotton ball, scissors
Step 1: Cut your brown paper into rectangles and roll them up real tight to make extra-skinny stems. Secure with glue as you go along.
Step 2: Cut some of the paper stems so that they're shorter than others. Vary the lengths from long (main stem) to tiny. Then glue the shorter stems to the main stem to form a branchy little twig.
Step 3: Take a tiny piece of cotton and roll it up into a ball that's about half a centimeter wide. Glue one tiny cotton ball to each tip of your paper twig. All done! Make as many of these as you like, and as branchy as you want them to be.
How to Make Paper Ixora Flowers (Jungle Geranium)
Ixora, a.k.a. jungle geranium, is really common as a hedge shrub in the Philippines, where it's locally called santan. Its flowers are small, but they bloom in showy clusters (like above). Us kids used to make necklace chains from those tubular flowers, or we'd sip nectar straight from the floral tubes. Literally suck on the flower for an itsy-bitsy drop of nectar!
Anyway, this paper craft's a bit more intricate to make, mostly because these flowers are supposed to be tiny. So if you have shaky hands like me, I recommend you use a clean pair of tweezers to help you out.
Materials: colored paper of your choice (I used an old brown paper bag that I just painted over with red food coloring), toothpicks, glue, scissors, tweezers (optional)
Step 1: Cut your paper into small four-petal shapes, no larger than a centimeter or two. Make as many as you want.
Step 2: Make a lengthwise crease down the middle of each petal so that you can lift its sides and make the flower '3D'. (See closeup below.) This is where your tweezers may come in handy.
Step 3: Take two 3D flowers and glue them on top of each other. Repeat with others.
Step 4: Glue each pair to the tip of a toothpick. Let glue dry completely. Repeat with others.
Gather ye santan buds and you've got a nice cluster. You can glue them together by the stems or just stick them individually into your bouquet. (I did the latter.)
Now it's time to put together all our paper blooms in one (upcycled) vase. At this point, I added one small cluster of real dried ixoras that I just found outside. It's that little plum-colored cluster at the bottom-right of the bouquet.
What simple joy. :) So now that I've more than given in to the dried-flowers trend, I know what I'll be doing for Christmas decor this year -- especially as I'm doing plastic-free holiday decorating again. Join me?
hy★
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