About a year ago my husband and I caught a BIG sale at Collage Annex (a local to Portland craft and stationary store) and bought all kinds of great art and craft supplies. The deals were so good we bought new (to us) supplies to try out projects we hadn’t worked with before. We got a set of crepe papers in Christmas-colors with a picture of a bouquet of poinsettias on the label that included a pattern to make the poinsettias to start with. The pattern had you make each petal as a half and glue it down the middle to have the texture of the paper mimic the flower’s veins. I like how it looked in the picture but in making them it took so much longer, the glue was hard to hide and I wasn’t bothered by the texture of the paper being funky. To me, these are paper flowers that are obviously paper, so go wild! I looked up examples of paper flowers on Pinterest and looked at a fresh bouquet I had on my table and after the experience of making the first couple of poinsettias I felt confident I could figure out how to make other flowers on my own.

Why paper flowers? They last a long time, you can get really creative, and you can make flowers that you couldn’t have naturally. That last bit was the inspiration for this post. The sun has been out this weekend and it feels like spring (though I am not convinced more winter isn’t on its way) so spring flowers have been on my mind, specifically Western Trillium.
About Trillium: These beautiful white flowers are some of the first you see out in our PNW forests and they are super fragile. The bracts (petals) soak up the sun to store energy for the plant to bloom again year after year, but if you pick the flower it can’t get that energy it needs and the plant dies. If left unpicked these flowers can live for several decades, so it really seems a shame when someone picks them.

What you’ll need: crepe paper, hot glue, wooden skewers, scissors, an old vase

Looking at a photo of a Trillium I took on a hike one spring, I cut pieces to match what I saw. Crepe stretches, so some trimming up may need to happen when you stretch them to round them out and give them shape. I didn’t have yellow so used gold instead (hey, this is a craft, it doesn’t have to be exact! I could paint it yellow, but think the gold is fun.)

The circle piece is where I started. I put the center over the top of the skewer which I’d put hot glue on and twisted.