Crepe Paper Flowers

Last month I made a crepe paper bouquet for my sister, Sally.  She wanted some bright colors that would look good in her living room.   I didn’t really like the only orange I had (a too bright Halloween orange), so after I finished the rest of the colors, Sally and I picked out a few floral stems at Michaels that had orangey berries on them, as well as some leaves.  I don’t make crepe paper leaves because they take forever and I don’t enjoy making them.

This arrangement is very similar to the wedding bouquets I made last year — flowers made using both the Dennison individual petal (or small strips of petals) technique, which was copied by Martha Stewart, and the sewing machine ruffler attachment technique, which I thought up myself, although I bet I’m not the first.  The crepe paper I use is varied — vintage duplex and single sheets I’ve purchased on ebay and Etsy, flat folds from Blumchen (they sell both single and duplex), super stretchy rolled Italian crepe from Etsy, and also plain old party shop streamers.  Sometimes, to get a heavier weight paper or a particular color combination,  I make my own duplex paper by spray gluing two sheets of single flat fold paper together.

The instructions for the Dennison/Martha Stewart flowers are available on Martha’s web site; later this week I will make some new ruffler flowers and write a tutorial for that technique, which I promised to do long ago.  I just finished making a Halloween arrangement for my daughter, and took lots of photos of the process, but I decided against using them for the tutorial since the flowers were all black and the details were hard to make out.