Flower Embellishments from Scraps :: Amy Heller

Hi everyone! It's Amy Heller here today and I'm really excited about the tutorial I'm bringing to you today!

Some of you may know, I'm both a scrapper and card maker. I love coming up with handmade embellishments that I can use both for my cards and for my layouts. One of my absolute favorite things to do is come up with new ways of using my various sized scraps that I'm constantly creating. I rarely toss my scraps - I try to use them until they're literally confetti sized. :) Hopefully this tutorial will give you another idea of how to maximize your paper and create something fun and unique for any of your paper crafting projects. Let's get started!

What you need:

A pile of patterned paper scraps
Paper Trimmer
2" Circle Punch and/or 1.5" Circle Punch
Scrap Piece of Cardstock at least 3" x 3"
Removable Double Sided Tape
Stapler
Scissors

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Various other embellishments as desired

The first thing I do when I'm looking to create a project from scraps, is I get organized by separating my scraps into sizes. Because we are creating long strips, I have organized my large pieces, medium pieces and long strips.

Now an extra benefit of this project is that it's the IDEAL project for using that extra bit of patterned paper that is at the bottom of each A-side piece of paper (shown above). The B-side (shown below) has all the paper information.

The B-side (shown above) has all the paper information. This slice of patterned paper is the exact same width that we are going to cut all of our paper for this project; 1/4" wide. Never again will you need to toss this little slice of paper that makes your layouts 12.25" tall! I love that!

Now we're going to start trimming. I started with my long strips of scraps, then moved to my medium scraps and then lastly, my large pieces of paper. Trim each scrap as close to 1/4" wide as possible. Don't worry about the length at this point, we'll take care of that later.

This what you end up with. A pile of scraps that will soon turn into something really fun!!

Now it's time to get things ready and organized. There's a couple ways I found it best to organize these strips in preparation for assembling the flowers. You can separate them by color (shown above)...

or by matching paper/sheet. This is really helpful if your layout or card uses a particular line/manufacturers papers, like Crate Paper's Restoration collection, like I have used :)

Next step is to choose between 10-15 strips that you'd like to use in your flower. Line up one end of your strips on a straight edge like the grid shown on my work surface. The various sizes of ends will be obvious on the other side of the strips - that's ok.

Holding down your strips, trim the strips at about 3" long. Set the finished strips aside.

Large Flower = 3" strips and 2" circle punch - Finished size 2.5"
Medium Flower = 2.5" strips and 1.5" circle punch - Finished size 2"
Small Flower = 2" strips and 1.5" circle punch - Finished size 1.5"

Taking your scrap cardstock and circle punch...punch out a circle. Note: it doesn't have to be perfect. This is just your guide and will not be a part of your finished flower.

Now cover your circle directly on your workspace with your removable doublestick tape. Do this liberally on all sides of your circle so that you pieces have ample sticky surface to hold them in place.

Bring your strips back into your workspace. Find the center point of your circle - you can mark it if you need to initially. Take one of your strips, and finding the center point of the strip, lay it diagonally across the circle, then do the same with a second strip.

The goal with each additional strip is to create an X within each open space until there are no more open spaces left...eventually getting to this:

Gently remove the tape, circle cardstock and flower from your workspace and hold it firmly between your fingers. If a strip slips, you can gently adjust it while the rest of the strips are still firmly in between your fingers.

Then, using an office or craft stapler, staple the center of the flower. You may need to staple both sides to create a firm grip.

Now is the really fun part! Get out that same circle cardstock, and use it as a guide to trim your flower so that all the strips are uniform in size around the center.

Or you can just eye it as well. Now your flower is finished! It's time to finish the embellishing as desired!

For these two, I used felt and paper flowers and then finished off the look with the epoxy/metal brads from Crate Paper's Restoration collection.

There are so many options for these cute little flowers. You can finish them with chipboard, you can spritz them with mist, add button centers, stitch around the perimeter, ink and distress, the list goes on and on! And I can't wait to try them all! Just to show you, from my initial pile of scraps shown at the beginning of the tutorial, I was able to create ten 3" flowers, two 2" flowers and two 1.5" flowers!! I made multicolored flowers - red, yellow, blue, green, cool and warm valued flowers.

And here's how I applied my newly created flowers!