Monday is Fun Day -Tissue Paper Flowers

I spent a few hours yesterday making tissue paper flowers.  I was going to use some nice sheets of crepe paper I bought a few years ago, but I couldn't find them, so I made a quick trip to a dollar store. 

I bought four packages in a range of colors, most of which I haven't used yet.  Each flower has three different colors of paper.  Sometimes the results are more subtle, like the different shades of pink.

Feeling tentative, I made the monochromatic pink ones first.  The reason why I had to buy four packages of tissue paper: some packages had brights; some had pastels.

I cut the edges differently on each one.  
 

Next I used an analogous color scheme, a spicy combination of red, orange, and yellow. 

A shortcut to getting these different results is to make just one accordion fold with the stack of three papers, then cut the folded stack into three pieces.  Tie off each piece with your method of choice (I used pipe cleaners).  In this example, for some of them I pulled the yellow first, to make a yellow center.  For the top one, I flipped it over and pulled the red first so I would have a yellow layer of outer petals.

Sometimes I trimmed the center color after fluffing.

One of the packages of tissue paper had writing on it - you can see it in the middle layer.  It gives a nice texture to the flower.

This is my last set, and I think I gravitated toward it because it resembles the colors in my new ottoman.  Just like with the other six flowers, some of these were fluffed from opposite directions, giving a nice variety without a lot of work.

Another example of paper with writing on it, this time green.  This is my favorite of the color combinations.  They should make real flowers like this, in my opinion.

Just nine pieces of tissue paper made all this.

While I was at the dollar store, I picked up a clear vase along with the tissue paper.  Now you can see all the petal trimmings.

I made this bouquet to take to our quilt guild meeting as a decoration.  Good luck getting it there and home again - the pipe cleaners are rather floppy, and this is just one of many things I'll be carrying.  But I chose pipe cleaners instead of bamboo skewers for stems, because pipe cleaners make it easier to arrange the layers at different heights.

Oh yeah - when putting the tissue paper away, I found the missing crepe paper.  Now I have lots of paper.