Asian Flowers - 10 Easy Steps

Here is the little tutorial that I was hoping to post today. The flourishes were cut from Paper Adventures patterned paper – Pink Scrolls which comes in Scraptivity's November 2007 kit. The flowers, as are most of the supplies, were created with the May 2010 kit. I hope that you enjoy. And, please check out Scraptiv!ty's forum each weekday this month for similar tutorials by the design team.

To help demonstrate the steps, I created a set of petals with double the size of my flowers because the photographs on the smaller petals were not coming out clear enough with my camera. The flowers on my "Reflections of China" layout were made with strips of paper 1/2"x1&1/2". For this demonstration, I used a 1"x3" strip, on most of the photographs.

1. Cut your strip
2. Fold it in half to make a narrow strip
3. Fold in half to shorten:


TIP: If you paper is thick, and hard to manipulate, (like mine was), soak your strip in water for 5 seconds and towel dry. This softens the paper nicely.

4. Now, if your paper were thinner than my Bazzill:textured cardstock – Pomegranate, you could cut a rounded edge on the open end of your folded papers, and steps four and five would be combined. But, since my double folded paper was too thick, I unfolded the second fold to cut a rounded edge from the top open corner, and cut from each outside edge. First one side,...
5. Then, the other side so that my strip looked like this:


6. Holding the strip folded lengthwise once, fold one of the halves down a second time like this:

7. Fold the other side down as well:


8. Fold it back as you did in step 3 to shorten. Pinch it tight in the center, because in the next step, you will unfold the outer edges to form the petals. But, for now, fold as such:


9. Unfold the outer edges. Each of my flowers needed steps 1 to 9 repeated twice for three sets. Since my flowers have 5 petals, I cut one of my sets in half to create a fifth petal:

10. Arrange your petals.

Thanks for checking out the tutorial! Blessings to you.