todos los flowers

The overtly Mexican Fiesta themed reception has been shelved in favor of something more... literary. But more on that later. Today, I want to share my flower project.

Problem? I want lots and lots of beautiful flowers I can't afford.

Solution? Make them. Hundreds of them. From paper.

Crazy? Maybe a little. But right now I'm short on cash and long on time (being underemployed has its benefits, I suppose), so for me, making my flowers makes sense.

Here are my first experiments in flower crafting. The yellow ones are made of tissue paper. The pink ones are crepe paper.




I was envisioning vases of lots of different shades of yellows, pinks, corals, and oranges. As it turns out, unless you're prepared to buy huge bulk quantities, it's pretty difficult to find a wide variety of subtly varied shades in tissue and crepe paper.

Aside from paper problems, I wasn't crazy about the pink flowers, and they were about three times more time consuming than the yellow carnation-style flowers.

I discovered coffee filter roses on Martha Stewart's website. They are beautiful, but also super-extra-time consuming. Plus, you had to paint each individual petal. I'm not that crazy.

Then, I saw a post on the discussion boards at weddingbee.com by a girl who made 200 of the suckers for her wedding and dyed them with fabric dye. When I learned this, I knew there was no going back.

I present to you, coffee filter roses, dyed with food coloring:



My goal is 300, completed by Christmas. I'm guessing I have about 70 so far.

Aaaand preliminary guesstimates on costs for 70 roses:

Floral wire - $1.25
Floral tape - $5.00 ($1.00/roll)
Coffee filters - $6.00 (~$2.00/200 count pack)

That comes out to about $0.18 per rose. When it's all said and done, it should cost me about $60.00 (and countless hours) to make 300 roses. I'll have a better cost breakdown when they're all finished and dyed.

I'll have to play around with them, but I might end up mixing the carnations and roses in the arrangements. What do you think?