Book Chrysanths

Working part-time in a Library has the great benefit of having access to damaged books, so when my friend and colleague had her birthday approaching and was kindly cooking us lunch to celebrate, I decide to go armed with flowers.....book flowers.

These are extremely simple to make and can be made on any scale, each flower used approx. 4 pages, but smaller versions use less. I took inspiration from DYSU's challenge of "clear, light pink and mauve" colour theme. Unfortunately I found these extremely difficult to photograph and the very pretty light purple piece of tissue that I had been saving for a project, looks very blue!

After slicing the pages into thin strips these were stuck in star pattern onto a circle of card (the circle wont show so they don't need to be precise, mine were just a bit larger than a 2p piece).

Each flower requires two layers, which once dry are curled (using your thumb, lightly pull fronds over closed scissors). The effect can be varied by alternating the direction of the curls, but for this project I had mine all curling backwards. I created stalks from rolled up paper. Slice an A4 piece of paper corner to corner, then roll up tightly, working diagonally to the smallest point. Using a glue gun, stick this between the two layers.

I created some buds from tissue twisted over some cotton wool, the stalks were created by staining kebab sticks (felt pens or paint works well), these were finished with some looped strips of the page strips and some slivers of green paper cut to form long leaves.

Each flower had centres of smaller petals formed from torn tissue.

I arranged the elements into a bouquet and added extra leaves attached to the stalks of the larger flowers and also onto strips of green card. these were then encased in matching tissue and some clear cellophane.

The bow was a very vibrant pink.....but this actually matches my friends hair!!!!!!!!!!!!!!