How to make your own artificial flowers

As nice as it would be to keep fresh flowers in your home all days of the week, sometimes that’s just not an option. There could be any number of reasons why you can’t buy fresh flowers – they’re expensive, their pollen stains the furniture, you’re allergic, the die too quickly – but whatever that reason may be, that doesn’t mean that you can’t decorate your house with flowers. We’re not talking about fresh flowers, though. We’re talking about artificial flowers. The word ‘artificial’ might remind you of the dusty plastic tulips your grandma used to keep in her kitchen, but artificial flowers have come a long way since then. There are some beautiful artificial flowers you can buy that are perfect for putting life back into your house. Or, if you’re not the type of person to buy your decorations, you could very easily make them yourself. Here are three easy-peasy ways to make artificial flowers.

With Paper or tissue

Paper flowers can be made in all sorts of ways and you can create lots of different types of flowers. The most common and easiest flower to make with paper is the rose. You’ll need a stick or some wire to make the stem, some green paper and some paper for your petals. You can use any colour of paper for your petals and even decorate it yourself to make your flowers unique. You could dab the paper with some watercolour paint, or maybe even use wrapping paper or book pages. You can be as creative as you want. So, start by cutting out some petals on your petal paper. Make them all sorts of different sizes and make a lot of them. Next, wrap your stick/wire in some green paper to make the stem. After that, find the smallest of your petals and start gluing them around the top of the stem, overlapping them and folding them over to cover the top of your stem. Keep building up your petals around the stem, slowly increasing in size. Keep curling them in gently so they’re folded into the centre rather than bending outwards. After you’ve finished gluing on all of your petals you can use any remaining green paper to wrap around the stem over the bottom of some of your petals to make them look neater. It’s easier to use tissue paper with this technique because it tends to be softer and easier to manipulate, but normal paper will make your flowers sturdier. So, it’s completely up to you.

With fabric

There are all sorts of creative ways to make fake flowers with fabric. Carnations are one of the easiest as well as the most impressive flowers to make yourself. You’ll need some silk of any colour, a candle and as an extra option you might also want to collect some pretty buttons or beads. To make your flower, cut your silk into circles. You’ll need circles of four different sizes (from big to small) and about four circles of each kind. Next, cut slits of about 1.5cm around the edges of all of your circles. Being very careful not to set yourself or your silk on fire, wave your circles over fabric over the lit candle. They should start wrinkling and puckering. If you hold the edges of the fabric over the candle you’ll also stop them from fraying. Now, all you have to do it sew them together. Pile them on top of each other, with the largest circles of fabric at the bottom of the pile, and put a few stitches into the middle of the flower. If you wrinkled your silk enough the stitches shouldn’t be visible, but if they are you can sow a nice button or bead in the middle of your flower to hide them.