crafting with blendy & becky: book page flowers

For our May craft, Blendy and I decided to make these book page flowers. I wasn't sure at first if I could make them—we've already established that I'm not naturally very crafty!—but they were surprisingly simple. I couldn't believe how quickly I picked it up, and soon I could form the petals without really thinking.

Rather than give you step-by-step instructions, I'm just going to point you to the site I used. Their pictures make following the directions incredibly easy.

Before we could start making the flowers, I had to decide which book I was willing to tear apart ... not an easy task for someone like me who loves her books! Then I remembered this book. I got it through Vine, and their rules stipulate that reviewers can't give possession of the products received to anyone else, though they can dispose of the product after a certain amount of time. Well, I still had the book on my shelf, and there was no chance I'd ever read it again ... so making book page flowers out of it seemed perfect!

Like I said before, you should go to this origami instruction website for directions, but here are a couple things I learned from making my flowers:

Make a template, then trace as many as you can onto a piece of paper. I found that when I was just measuring (say 4" x 4"), I often wasn't quite accurate ... so each petal of my flower was a slightly different size. Tracing a template eliminated that problem.

Also, use pencil, not pen (as I did), to trace the template. If I didn't fold the petal perfectly, I often had a little black showing through.

At first, the flower making was slow going, but soon I could complete a flower in about 15 minutes. It's perfect busy work while watching a movie or chatting!

Here are my completed flowers on top of the book I "sacrificed" for this project. (Side note: I helped with VBS at my church this week, and one of the daily lessons was on sacrifice—how Jesus sacrificed his life to save us. The teacher did an illustration using q-tips and money showing that not everything we are asked to give up is a sacrifice ... and I think this book would fall under that category!)

I'm not sure yet what I'm going to do with the flowers—I guess I'll put them out as decoration somewhere. Aren't they cute?