Hand-made Christmas gifts can be a fun and affordable way to survive the holiday season. This week, our staff tried their hands at making some ‘simple paper flowers’ with instructions from Kelsey Elam. Here’s a brief recap of our crafternoon.

WHY THIS BOOK…

We’ll be honest – we mainly decided to test 100 Simple Paper Flowers out as it promised to be simple – it’s in the title and everything. It also helps that it’s a beautiful book, inside and out. The author, Kelsey Elam, is a paper artist, handmade enthusiast, and flower creator from Missouri.

MAKING THE FLOWERS…

To prepare, we bought proper floristry tape and floristry wire online, but it’s just as effective to use green washi tape and gardening wire instead. You can buy the washi tape from stationery shops, such as Officeworks, and gardening wire from Bunnings. You’ll also need tissue paper and cardboard, which you can buy many places. We got ours from Daiso. You’ll also need scissors and glue.

(While we didn’t need these particular items, some of the book’s projects needed modelling clay and stamen and we can confirm we’ve seen both stocked at Spotlight.)

And now it was time to start crafting… Most of the flowers had four components – stems, stamens, petals and leaves. Once we got into the swing of making each of our two designs (for marigolds and godetias), we felt confident enough to experiment a little and we all had a lot of fun with it.

THE END RESULT…

We’re pleased to report that even the most skeptical (and craft-challenged) among us were delighted at just how simple these paper flowers genuinely were to create. We were pretty chuffed with the final results. They looked exactly like real paper flowers!

We were especially impressed with how you could make a stamen out of a cotton bud tip, and several of us very much enjoyed crumpling up our petals for the godetia flower.

The most important things that we all took away from the session was this: you do not need to be precise. In fact, it’s better if you’re not as after all, nature isn’t.