How To Make Pretty Tissue Paper Flower Pencil Toppers!
It’s that time again! Time to go back to school. Except this year, a lot of you are going back to school at home and that brings a bunch of new challenges.
We’re hoping it can also bring some pleasant surprises… like maybe something pretty for your desk?! If the kids have to do school at home, they might as well do it their way and for us, that’s a pencil holder full of tissue paper flowers!
Supplies needed to make pretty Tissue Paper Flower Pencil Toppers:
- tissue paper, in roughly 5×7 sheets, in pretty colors
- floral tape
- floral wire (or any easy to manipulate wire)
- wire cutters
- pencils
- scissors (not shown)
Now let’s get started!
How to make pretty Tissue Paper Flower Pencil Toppers:
1. First, take two sheets of tissue paper and accordian-fold them in small inch-to-half-inch folds.
2. Then cut a length of wire (double what you want your stem length to be (12 inches roughly). Use your wire cutters to snip it. Don’t ruin your household scissors.
3. Fold your tissue paper-accordion in half and lay your wire in the fold.
4. Bend the wire over the fold and twist the wire over itself to hold the tissue paper secure and tight.
5. Then take your tissue paper all in one rectangle and carefully round the edges to make petals (see below)
6. Next, separate your petals and start to fluff them apart from each other. Fluff fluff fluff. If this seems familiar you might remember doing it from this craft. Same method just on a much smaller scale.
7. Once your petals are all pulled away from each other and fluffed into a circle shape, now it’s time to wrap your stem in floral tape. This step is tricky but worth learning. If you master it you can create your own boutonniere and save yourself loads of money on corsages and other floral design. Floral tape stretches and becomes sticky so peel off a tiny bit of tape and wrap it around the base of your flower.
Pull it to release its stickiness and wrap it onto itself. This might take a few rounds before your initial starting tape is good and stuck down. Once it is secure start pulling the tape downwards at an angle and wrap it around your wire stem. The more vertical you pull the tape the less tape you’ll have to use so stretch and pull gently until you have covered the entire stem (see the pictures below).
8. When you get to the bottom, reverse your angle and wrap the tape back upwards towards the flower for a few rotations. Tear your tape and stretch it and stick it down. It should stick to itself and become invisible.
9. Now that your flower and stem are complete. Take the stem of your flower and corkscrew it around your pencil. (see pictures above)
So easy right? Repeat as many times as you like and create a whole bouquet of flower pencils!
You can even switch up your tissue paper colors and petal cutting techniques to create different looking flowers. Experiment with combinations. For the above we cut sharp angles for petals and it turned out to look more like a carnation.
Here, we added twice as much tissue and used a half size of yellow in the center to create a ruffled poppy look. The possibilities are endless!
These make great gifts. Give a bouquet to a teacher or your mom or even hand them out for valentines when that rolls around later in the school year. Or, just keep them on your desk and turn that pencil cup into a vase of flowers that will never need water!
More Paper Crafts:
1. Big Impact, Little-Effort Tissue Flower Arrangement
2. Hanging Rainbow Paper Plate Craft
3. Easy Spring Flower Garland DIY
