Adventures with Paper Flowers

I love all things flowers and gardening, so there needs to be lots of plant life at my wedding. Being a crafty gal, I thought paper flowers would be an excellent way to decorate the reception because they can be made far in advance, come in any colour and don't depend on the season. 

I came across a tutorial from Martha Stewart on making flowers from crepe paper. Warning: like most Martha Stewart projects, these flowers are time consuming and finicky but the results are pretty impressive. This tutorial has instructions to make tulips, peonies, roses and lilies one petal at a time.

Starting with this and the peony template:

Lots of tiny little pieces of crepe paper eventually became this:

This flower looks quite realistic, but even 8 months isn't enough time for me to make all of these that I'd want.

The crepe paper flowers featured on the blog Wednesday are quick and simple.

But they look a little strange from the side...

Maybe a whimsical take on flowers would work better. Like these tissue paper pompoms that are showing up all over the blogosphere (I finally get to use that word in a sentence!). I could say that this was my attempt at an ombre pompom, but really these were the only colours of tissue paper I had in the house :)

Overall, these projects just weren't giving me the results I wanted. I may use the Martha Stewart tissue paper flowers for a something small at the reception, but otherwise I'm walking away from the paper.