Colorful Paper Flowers

Making colorful paper flowers is a tradition in Mexico on Day of the Dead (Dia de los Muertos)

These pretty paper blossoms are super-fun and easy to make! They make inexpensive decorations for parties and are popular to use as party favors as well.

All you need are a few sheets of tissue paper in your favorite colors and a handful of pipe cleaners.

Materials

• Tissue Paper
• Scissors
• Pipe cleaner twist ties or floral wire
• Dowel or stick (optional)

I choose 8 pieces of tissue paper, stacked them together and folded them in half and in half again then cut the stack down the middle, then took the 2 smaller stacks and cut them in half again, giving me 4 stacks of 8 each of the 8 colors.

Choose two colors, using all 4 sheets of each of the two colors. Stack them in the order you’d like the colors to appear in the finished flower.

Begin folding the full stack of eight pages accordion-style about one inch width. Crease your folds as you go. When you have it folded all the way fold it in half length wise and wrap a pipe cleaner around the middle.

Now cut rounded corners through all the layers on each long end. You could also cut points. Oh, and do this over a trash can or something, because it gets really
messy! (If you're having a hard time getting the scissors through all the layers, you can do half at a time. The cuts don't need to match up perfectly either).

Now comes the fun part- Folding!

You can start on one side and alternate back and forth to the other side as you go, or you can fold all of one side and then all of the other. When making the flowers, it doesn't really matter.

Fan out one side as best you can with your left hand, and try to keep
them spread out as you gently peel the topmost layer of one side up towards the center. Begin at one edge and work across to the other, shaping the "petals" up as you go.

To make the medium flower, which looks more like a carnation than a peony, cut the stacks in half lengthwise.

The rest of the steps are the same as before.

To make the small flower, cut the stack into thirds length wise, then cut each of the stacks in half width wise.

(I hope that makes sense) then fold the paper 1/2 inch

The smaller you make the flowers the harder it is to open them up

I hope you have fun making these! I can't wait to see your versions.

Thanks for looking.