My older sister got married last year, and had the most wonderful wedding day.  The venue was the Swan at the Globe in London, and the day had a vintage / 1920s theme.  She's got an amazing eye for detail, and is full of creative ideas, so as one of her bridesmaids I got roped into helping her make various things for her wedding day, which was great fun. 

For their first anniversary, I wanted to make something myself that would fit in with the traditional first wedding gift of paper.  I searched online for ages to find ideas and tutorials, and loved the idea of making a bouquet of paper flowers out of newspaper to give a lovely vintage feel.  As it was I struggled to find many tutorials that I thought I'd be able to make without looking too handmade, but found lots of photos for inspiration.

I didn't take any pictures of the process I used, so will just have to try and explain as best I can!

First of all, this is what you'll need to make these flowers:

- a newspaper

- some florist wire - I asked in our local florist and was given some for free

- sellotape or florists tape - the latter is green in colour and neater looking, but you can get away with plain sellotape and just cover it over at the end

- some PVA glue - if you want to cover the tape with newspaper at the end

To make the flowers, you need to cut individual petal shapes from the newspaper, in three different sizes.  The smallest ones should be about 3-4cm in length, the largest about 8-9cm.  The petals are teardrop shaped, you can make them as wide or narrow as you like but I think wider looks more 'rose like'.  You can cut a batch in one go from a cluster of pages of the newspaper.  Once cut you need to pinch the top and bottom of the petal, making them curve slightly - but keep the three sizes separate.

Next, cut a whole load of small pieces of sellotape.  You'll use these to hold the petals in place.

To attach the first petal, and make sure that you don't have a spiky bit of wire poking out, you should pierce the petal near the base and fold the wire down back on itself to hold the petal in place.  Then starting with the smallest petals, wrap them around the first petal one at a time, holding them in place with a small piece of sellotape.

Keep adding more petals, moving up to the medium and then the larger petals as you go.  When you've got enough petals on, you can either leave the sellotape visible, or cover it with a strip of newspaper wrapped around with PVA glue, to give a neater finish.

(download)

Click here to download:

project-12-newspaper-rose-bouquet-uqCGoysaAzpseadtChyq.zip (3.52 MB)

I'll have to be honest, it took me ages, so I ended up with a bouquet of six instead of the planned dozen roses, and my hands were black with newspaper print by the end, but I was really pleased with the result - just a shame I didn't do a great job of capturing them on camera in their full glory!