lilies

Yesterday afternoon Stella and I spent about an hour making some paper lilies for her teachers as an end of the year gift.  Stella was very excited about this project. She has four teachers who work in her classroom so we made four flowers. 

I took four sheets of white printer paper and cut them so they would be square.  Stella drew on them with white, gold and silver crayons.  Then she painted the paper with dot paints until there was no white space left. (Stella loves to dot paint, and it was a perfect medium for this project because it fills in a large space quickly and dries fast, too).  We blow dried the papers to speed up the drying even more because patience is not our strong suit.

I folded each paper into a lily using directions from one of my origami books.  This fold brought back memories for me. I folded 145 of these lilies for our wedding in 2002. We planted them in flats of grass and each flower had a paper leaf that served as a table card for each guest.  Most people took their flowers home, too, so it was also like a favor.

To make stems, I cut some lengths of 18 gauge brass wire, formed a small loop at the top with my pliers to prevent any sharp edges from poking through, and then pressed the loop to the base of a flower.  Holding it there, I wrapped the wire with green floral tape, covering the loop, the base of the flower and the entire length of wire. After wrapping, I pulled the flower out, added a dab of glue to the base and pushed it back in just to be sure it would be totally secure.

We used pinking shears to cut green paper leaf shapes and clear address labels to print a little message for each teacher (although if you were thinking ahead a bit more  you could print the message directly onto the leaves).  

Stella handed out her flowers this morning with big smiles all around.