Tattered Bloom Tutorial

Welcome to my first ever online flower tutorial. It's a tattered paper bloom which incorporates one of my favourite techniques of wetting and shaping card. Some of you will have seen this before in PDF format but I thought I'd bring it over here too.

So to begin. The materials you will need:

Card -  Ivory, Dark blue, Light blue

Sun Shaped Punch

Dark Blue Ink Pad

From the light blue card, cut out a 5cm square and a 4cm square.

Start from middle of the top edge and tear to the middle of the left hand edge. Keep tearing to the middle of the bottom edge, right hand edge, back up to the top.

Do this with both squares and you will now have two rough shaped circles.

With a pencil, lightly draw a circle in the centre and five lines going out to the edge. 

Using the pencil marks as guides, tear the card to make the petals.

With a mister, spray the card pieces with water. You want it lightly wettenned, not soaked through.

Take the back of a paint brush and press into the middle of each flower shape. 

Carefully fold the petals up around the brush’s handle.

Squeeze the card tight around the brush to form a tube like shape and carefully remove.

With a heat gun, give the shapes a blast, to dry them out. 

Now, VERY carefully, unfurl the shapes. You need to feel your way around each petal, one by one. It’s easy to rush and tear a petal off. Once flattened out, dry out again with a heat gun

Take your ink pad and apply to the edges of the petals. I used a dark blue but any dark colour, say a brown, will be an excellent alternative.

With tweezers, curl the sides of the petals towards you. If you don’t have tweezers to hand, curl the petals around a cocktail stick.

Punch four sun shapes (approx. 15mm dia) out of the darkest card. Take a mouse mat and press each shape into the mat with the back of the paint brush to form a bowl.

Scrunch up one shape as tightly as you can. Add to the centre of a second shape with a dab of glue. Scrunch the outer shape around the central bud.

Take this bud and glue to a third shape. Scrunch up.

Finally take this bud and glue to the fourth shape. Again scrunch up. 

You now have the three components for your tattered bloom.

Place a dab of glue in the centre of the largest flower and arrange the smaller one on top. Try to offset the petals to give a rounder looking flower.

Add another dab of glue to the centre and attach the bud. And there you have it. You can stop there and use this flower in your projects as it is. However, if you’d like to add some leaves...

Take a strip of the ivory card (approx. 10cms x 5cms) and fold it in half along the length.

With scissors, cutting along the folded edge, make three rough half-leaf shapes. Open them up to see your results and if you wish, fold again and fine tune your leaf shapes.

When you are happy with your leaves. Spritz them with water.

Scrunch the leaves up into ball shapes and dry with a heat gun.

Unfurl the shapes and fold in half to revive the central crease in each leaf. As an optional extra, you can distress the edges carefully, with a craft knife, scissor edge or distressing tool.

Add a dab of glue to one end of each leaf and arrange behind the flower.

Once you’ve made your first tattered blooms and learnt the process, you can begin to produce them in batches, to have ready in your stash collection for future projects.