Mexican Paper Flower How-To

Last year I made some paper flowers for my wedding reception centerpieces (blogged here) and I made a new batch of flowers for my Frida Kahlo 'self portrait' Halloween costume!

Paper flowers are very inexpensive to make and lots of fun, all you will need is tissue paper, pipe cleaners (or string) and a little bit of time!

Here's what you need:

1. Tissue paper or crepe paper

2. colorful pipe cleaners or yarn

(I chose yarn this time around because I want to tie them around a headband to put in my hair for my Frida costume and didn't want to worry about pipe cleaners poking me in the head) :]

3. Scissors


Start off with square pieces of tissue paper. The more pieces you use per flower, the fuller your flower will look. To make extra large flowers use full sheets of paper, for medium flowers use 1/4 of a full sheet, for small flowers (like the green one I made for this tutorial) cut the paper down even more to 1/8 the size of a full sheet.



Once you have your squares cut (I am using 9 cut squares to make one flower, but you can use more for a fuller looking flower), stack them on top of each other then fold them into an accordion shape.

Cut a triangle shape on each side of your 'accordion'.

Tie a string or wrap a pipe cleaner around the center of your flower. Make sure your knot is at the bottom of your flower (the bottom of my sample flower is dark green).

I like to trim the edges because sometimes my square pieces aren't completely square, this way your flower petals will come out more evenly on each side of your flower.

I also like to cut the tips of the 'petals' into a wavy shape (or cut triangles for a jagged look) to make the petals look more realistic, because flower petals in nature usually have pointed or rounded edges.



Fan out your flower and start to pull each 'petal' towards the center, carefully...

until you have completed a whole side. Once one side is complete, you can move onto the other side.

Once you're finished your flower will look something like this.

As you can see, I went a little crazy. I probably won't be using all of these for my costume but the left overs will be great for shrines, altars, and other craft projects!