Burlap Flower Tutorial

Good evening fellow bloggers! Today I bring you a tutorial on how to make burlap flowers for those 'man' pages.

Having primarily men to scrap--I'm constantly trying to come up with masculine flowers for my pages. A hard task since obviously most flowers are geared towards feminine pages. For a while I had this idea of making a burlap flower. However, I wanted it to have dimension--I didn't want it to be flat. It finally dawned on me how I could achieve this look. I modeled these flowers after the Grunge Flowers that Tim Holtz made so very popular. In fact, to get a more detailed step-by-step tut on how to make this kind of flower in general, please refer to his tutorial here.

You can find these burlap flowers in full action on my page titled 'Brothers'.

Here are your basic list of supplies: Big Shot or any other compatible die cut machine, flower die (I used Sizzix Original Die - Flower Layers #5 in my example) although you can use any flower die as long as it has petals, burlap, white puffy paint, distress ink, pencil or thin paint brush for rolling/shaping petals & a heat gun.

So let's get started!

Step 1: This is the main trick in making this type of flower. Take your burlap & glue it onto a piece of cardstock/paper. This makes for another great way to use up those scraps! Try to glue the burlap to scraps that have around the same tone of color as the burlap--in other words anything in the brown/tan family as shown here. Let the glue dry for a few minutes. If you run this through your die cut machine right away, you'll get glue on your die.

Cut out three flowers.
As you can see in the top of this picture I had already made one flower. Since the burlap is adhered to the paper, it'll be sturdy enough for you to shape & in turn will give you a burlap flower with dimension.

Step 2: Now start going through the same steps used in Tim Holtz's Grunge Flower tutorial. I'll present them at a high level.

Snip your petals about 1/2 an inch to make it easier to curl your petals later.

Step 3: Cut the flowers as shown here. Starting from left to right: completely cut out one petal, completely cut out two petals and for the last flower snip one petal all the way to the center of the flower but leave all petals on the flower.

Step 4: This step is optional. I wanted to give my flower more color in order to make it stand out on my page. So I misted it with Suede Glimmer Mist. You can do the same if you want your flower to have more color to it.

Step 5: Here's my flower all misted.

Step 6: I wanted each layer of the flower to stand out. So I decided to highlight the edges of the petal with puffy paint. I like white because you can then ink the white to make it any color you need it to be. You can find puffy paint at any Michaels, AC Moore, Hobby Lobby etc--just about any craft store really. I found mine at Michaels.

Step 7: Here's my flower with the puffy paint added. Let the paint completely dry before proceeding. It takes about 4 hours for the paint to dry according to the instructions on the bottle--but it's worth the wait!

Step 8: Once the puffy paint is dry--you're going to heat it up with your heat tool. As the puffy paint heats up it'll well...puff! That's what gives this particular paint it's name. Do not hold the heat gun too close to the paint or you'll burn it. The paint will puff with the slightest amount of heat.

Step 9: This step is also optional. If you want to give your puffy paint some color...ink it up! White didn't really go with my page--so I inked it up a bit with some Spiced Marmalade distress ink.

Step 10: Glue your flower together by overlapping the petals. I use a hot glue gun to do this--you can use whatever glue you feel glues fast & good!

NOTE: If you're using a glue gun--I found out that you should curl the petals glued together right away instead of letting the glue fully cool off. I curled the petals after the glue completely dried & I had to turn into a gladiator to do so because the glue hardens the petal! You can still shape them--but it's just harder to do so.

Step 11: Curl your petals down by using a pencil or the handle of a thin paint brush.

Step 12: Here I am shaping the center of the flower. The center of the flower consists of the two petals cut out from one of the flowers. I curled one petal down, overlapped them & then curled the other petal in as shown here.

Step 13: What you put in the center of your flower is up to you. You can either put all the petals you cut out from your flowers or you can put stamens like I did. I decided to go with stamens that I had in my stash. If you ever want to insert stamens into the center of a flower--use a wire as shown here. Loop your wire through the middle of your stamens--then run the wire through the center of the flower & pull your stamens through.

Step 14: Layer your flower by off-setting each layer & you're done! Here's my finished flower. NOTE: as you work you may rub off some of the distress ink from the puffy paint. If so, simply ink up your flower at the end again.

As mentioned before...to see a more detailed step-by-step tut on making this flower in general--refer to Tim Holtz's Grunge flowers here.
The neat part about this is that this will work with any type of fabric. So if you have pretty fabric that you want to make flowers from but don't want flat flowers--simply adhere the fabric to a piece of cardsdtock & you're good to go.

Hope you all enjoyed this tutorial & thank you so much for stopping by!

Till my next post...