DIY: Handmade Paper Flowers

A new baby ... exciting times!  My near and dear friend Susan, who you read about HERE and HERE, enlisted my help in creating shower invitations to celebrate the birth of her grandchild, Buster (in utero nickname).  My only instructions were to not make anything babyish. 

The scrap paper aisle of a local craft store served as inspiration and aided in defining my color palate.

Since we knew the baby was a boy, I chose muted shades of blue, yellow, green, peach and a touch of red.  I enlisted the help of my lovely daughter, Lauren, and together we cut out hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of flower shapes.  We didn't stick to just scrapbook paper but used maps, vellum, graph paper and pages from old books. 

We then scored each piece so that the petals curved up a bit and looked more natural.  We used this scoring board which is available HERE, among many other places.

After scoring each piece, we stacked them based on color and shape preference, punched a hold in the center and added a brad like the ones pictured HERE.

The finished product was pretty spectacular!  The invitations fit nicely in the greeting card envelopes that I bought HERE.  I used a fancy font to address the envelopes and ran them through the printer.  Extra postage was required for mailing.

There is a little more to this story in that Baby Buster arrived early so the shower had to be postponed.  Another time... 

Here is my creative daughter Lauren and great friend *Grandma* Susan.

Click HERE to check out all of the goodies in my Ivy Lane Etsy shop, all made from recyclables.

~Merrill ♥