Life With a Grin: Finding the right paper flower... to be made from comic books...

So, here we have paper flowers made out of comic book pages and construction paper:

I was tasked to make some paper flower arrangements for a co-worker's bridal shower that involved comic books. We had a few donated comic books and we ended up making approximately 140 flowers. It takes one comic book page per flower. I only had about a week and a half, so I knew I need something that could be created fairly easily on a mass level--I had helpers, don't worry. We needed something that looked natural, but was still whimsical looking with the comic book paper. I scoured Pinterest and tried a few different styles at first.

This design was supposed to be a daisy, but it looked very robotic to me. Not a very natural look:

Then I tried this design. It is how I usually make tissue paper flowers, a design which always looked gorgeous with tissue paper, so I thought I would try it with the comic book page. Unfortunately, the comic book paper is way, way too thick for this design. I ended up ripping a lot of the paper trying to separate the layers. Just way to hard and time consuming:

Then I found this little rosette design on Pinterest. It was exactly the flower I was looking for--easy to make, quick, and natural looking. And it still looks like a flower:

The sample on Pinterest was a bouquet of yellow flowers made out of different shades and designs of yellow scrapbook paper.

Here's how you do it:

Cut a wonky circle, about 6 inches in diameter. You can make them bigger if you want, but I was limited to 6 inches since that is the width of the comic book pages. I used a page from "The Tick" comic book. I would also suggest using the most colorful pages possible and also cutting off any white edges you might have.

Once you have a slightly misshapen circle, cut a spiral to the center. Make that cut a little wonky as well, full of bumps and lumps and curves. It will give texture to your petals.

Then, roll your spiral in a somewhat tight circle.

Wind it all the way to the center piece of the spiral.

Then the fun part... Let go of your flower and let it form itself in the palm of your hand. It will unwind and naturally form a flower shape.

Put a big old glob of hot glue on the bottom circle (this was the center of you spiral) and stick your spiraled flower form right in the middle of the glue. Don't burn yourself. You can see the dried glue in the center of this pink and yellow one below:

For the stem, I just used pipe cleaners (a.k.a. chenille sticks) and taped them on. If I could do it all over again, I would have hot glued the stems on the bottom of the flower. Some of the buds fall off the stem--scotch tape doesn't hold it on so well.

For the vase display, I painted regular old glass jars that we got for a buck at Michael's with this Martha Stewart frost glass paint. It turned out really nice. I think one coat looks really nice. I tried a second coat on one of the vases, but the paint leaves a rough texture, so when I put on a second coat, it didn't paint on as smooth. So the one layer was plenty, I think.