Wedding Blog

After searching around the internet for cheap cone shaped coffee filters for the paper roses project, I found the best deal at Amazon.com. I decided to go with the “natural” colored filters. I thought the white would be too much white and I also did not want to have to paint all of the roses like Martha did. There was no mention of what size filters were needed so I bought size #6. This is a plus in two ways 1) they are the largest available and 2) they are the type of filters my coffee pot uses just in case this project ends up being a bust.
My first several roses I attempted to do according to the video on Martha’s site. It didn’t go well. I almost pulled all of my hair out. Seriously, all of it. I had so much trouble with the floral tape. According to Martha and Cassie you are supposed to wrap each petal around the last and secure it with floral tape. Maybe it was the brand I was using, but it really wasn’t holding. I’ve used floral tape a lot in the past and never had this much trouble. So, I switched to double stick tape and wrapped the flower in floral tape after it was done.

Originally I was not going to post a tutorial because there is one on Martha’s site, but after all the difficulty I had I decided to show you how I was able to get them looking flower like. (you can click on the images to enlarge)

Here are the pieces:
You can download and print the templates from Martha’s site. Her templates show only one petal on each coffee filter, using 8 filter per flower. I cut out 2 or 3 petals from each filter depending on petal size.

Step 1:
Take petals 1 and 1.5 and overlap them. Poke a hole through both layers. Put the wire through the hole, bend it down and twist to secure.

Place a piece of DST (double stick tape) along the bottom edge of the petals.

Roll the petals around the wire and secure with DST.

Step 2:
Roll petal 2 around your bud and secure with DST.

Repeat with petal 2.5.

Step 3:
Roll petal 3 around bud and secure with DST. This one is a little difficult - you may have to play with it a bit to get the petal to wrap around smoothly.

Step 4:
Wrap petal 4 around bud and secure with DST.

Step 5:
This part is very awkward to try to hold onto while taping. Stick 3 of the number 5 petals around the bud and secure with DST.

Repeat with 3 more number 5 petals and secure.

Step 6:
Start to pull apart the flower and curl the petals. I use the edge of my scissors to curl as if I were curling ribbon for a birthday gift. You don’t want to curl them too much or they look like they are falling off the bud.

Carefully pull apart each layer of petals. The inner layers are tighter and don’t pull apart easily. The inner most petals don’t move at all.

As you can see, after this step you have a messy flower-ish type thing.

Step 7:
At this point I use more DST around the base of the flower to tighten up the outer petals and clean things up a bit.

You can also see if there are any holes in the flower where one or two additional petals are needed.

Add these petals and secure with DST, curl.

This is what your flower should look like at this point:

Step 8:
Cut about 8-10 inches of floral tape.

Wrap the floral tape around the bottom of the rose and about an inch down the wire. Pull the tape as you wrap and it will be slightly sticky. If you pull too hard it will rip and if you don’t pull hard enough it won’t stick. This stuff is tricky.

Step 9:
Fin!

This coffee-filter-sticky-awkward-frustrating-never-going-to-end project is definitely time and double stick tape consuming, but I am going to forge ahead.

Here are the first dozen paper roses:
If enough of y’inz are interested I can do a Bee-TV tutorial. What do you think?

Are you using non-floral centerpieces? If so, what are they?