Flower basket #2

In my previous post I said I would not show how I made flowers for the hanging baskets, but I have come up with a couple of new ideas that I want to share. Maybe they are not new at all, in which case you will just get a confirmation that the methods work.

As I have said repeatedly, I am not interested in making more of the same. I could have simply covered the other two baskets with my paper daisies, but that wouldn't have been much of a challenge. I tried punching red tissue paper, but it was too thin and just got crumpled. Then I thought that I could make roses from red tissue paper. I have made roses from oven-baked clay, but they would be too heavy for a basket. The tissue paper is, as you see, a paper crown I have been saving from Christmas. I save everything, and I have made fires with red and orange tissue paper. But now, roses.

This is what I did. Again, maybe it is a well-known method, but I haven't seen it. I wrapped a piece of paper round a length of dowel that I just happened to have in front of me - anything suitable will do. Then I cut off the excess of paper leaving 1mm that I then twisted and flattened. Then I pushed about 3mm of the paper from the dowel and cut off. Here are your little roses, ready to be glued onto your basket. (Or I guess you can add stems). 

It was easy to shape the flowers with tweezers before gluing.

I showed in the previous post what I used for basket.

So far so good. Again, I could have added some white and pink daisies, but I had been looking at various images and suddenly felt an urge to make some fuchsias. There are several tutorials on Pinterest about making paper fuchsias, in easy languages such as Spanish and Dutch, and all of them use punches. If I continue to make flowers and flower shops, I may invest in more punches, but at the moment I didn't have one required to make fuchsias. But I decided to make some anyway.

I punched out some five-petal flowers and some circles from appropriately coloured paper. Making holes in the middle curled them already, but I had to curl the inside bits slightly more. For stems, I used teeny tiny stamens from a full-size paper rose the origin of which I cannot remember. It was hard work because the flowers are so small. I put a ruler in the picture to give the sense of scale. 

Frankly, I didn't have the patience to make more than these even though I have more petals. I had to curl the outside petals back a bit more. I have a magnifying glass, but it doesn't combine well with my eyeglasses.

I like the result. The fuchsias are actually hanging over the side.

Then I simply added some generic pink flowers here and there.

Here the second basket joins the first one. In this picture, I have also made some improvements, adding mouldings and arranging the display in a more interesting way.

I will make at least one more basket, and maybe I will add a shelf, some posters, rolls of wrapping paper? The back wall looks too bare. I am enjoying myself.