Weddingbee Blog

I was surprised, flattered, and thrilled to discover that so many people like, and also want to make, the escort flowers that we made for our wedding!

I received so many questions asking for more detail on how to make them that I decided it would probably be easiest for me to just do a tutorial. I’m excited you all want to make them! So here’s how I did things, which I’m sure is by no means the only way to do them. I tried to make it fairly detailed so as to answer all the questions I’ve gotten so far, but if you have any more questions, feel free to ask in the comments or PM me.

To start, here’s the paper I used:

(origami paper: one side is blue, the other side is white)

I bought it off eBay (here is the listing for the exact paper I ordered), and the paper comes in 6 x 6 inch squares. I needed 3 inch squares, but it ended up being cheapest for me to buy this and cut it into quarters myself.

(I used scissors for this demo, but I actually cut all the squares for the wedding using a paper cutter at work)

As I said in my previous post, I wanted to make 160 flowers = 800 petals, which meant starting with 200 of those 6 inch squares. Since I bought 400 sheets of the 6 inch squares, obviously I had way too much and I still have a whole unopened pack left over. Blue paper, anyone? Moral of the story: calculate how much paper you’ll actually need before you buy it!

I won’t go into the actual folding pattern here because I couldn’t do it any better or in more detail than this tutorial. So once you’ve got the hang of folding the petals, you should make 5 per flower. Be especially careful to line up corners if you’re using paper that’s white on one side, so you don’t have a huge white edge showing as in the second photo below. Some edge peeking over seemed to be unavoidable no matter how careful I was, so if this will bother you, perhaps consider a paper that is the same color on both sides.

(5 petals ready to be glued together and into a flower)

(white part that will show if things aren’t perfectly aligned… which they never are )

Once the petals are folded but before you glue them together, cut off the bottoms so that the flower will sit flat and not have the pointy end (don’t know what I’m talking about? See the end of my very first post about these). I used the Fiskars Medium Circle Squeeze Punch, which normally you would use to punch a 1 in. circle out of paper. I’ll show you why I wanted a curved cut in a minute.

(anything that will cut on a curve will do, it doesn’t have to be this punch)

(cutting off the tips of the petals. Just be sure to always cut off the same amount so the petals are all the same height)

Now. To actually stick these suckers together, I used hot glue. I tried with a glue stick at first, but it was messy and not very reliable. The flowers always seemed to fall apart pretty easily with a glue stick, but they were for sure good and solid with a hot glue gun! Here’s how I glued them together:

1) Because I’m right handed, I found it easiest to wield the glue gun with my right hand. So I held the petal in my left, with my finger just barely holding down the tip of one of those flaps. See how the petal is sideways with the cut off end to the right? I’m gluing along the edge of that top flap:

(Use a relatively thin bead/small amount of glue, or else it will squish out!)

2) To glue the petal together, I held the tip of the flap I had put glue on with my thumb, then aligned the tip of the flap on the other side and pinched together with my right hand to glue it shut. Just pinch the center edge together, because if you pinch the whole petal you’ll put a crease down the curved pointy back of the petal.

(one done petal! And I didn’t cut the tip off perfectly, which is why the bottom is a bit uneven)

So now you see how my arced cut on the bottom of the petal led to a flat bottom? Here’s what happens if you cut straight across, or if you have too much of a curve:

(straight across cut, regular cut with punch, bigger cut with same punch)

Because you are forming the petal into a round shape with the top of the petals lining up, if you cut straight across the bottom of your petal, it will end up with the angle you see on the left. In the middle, I used the 1 inch punch the way you saw me align it in the photos above which gives a relatively flat bottom. On the right, you see that I cut off a much larger portion, and the petal now has a funny shaped bottom. If you need/want to cut off a bigger piece, you need a less angled cut, so maybe use a 1.5 inch or 2 inch punch. Or if you can be consistent with scissors and can cut at the proper curve, you don’t need a punch! I am much too picky to be inconsistent with scissors, so I used something that I could align the exact same way every time.

Now onto the flowers themselves! Again I used hot glue:

(Don’t just put a bead of glue along the center fold because then the petals don’t stick together well and the flower looks funny)

Be sure to align the center folds of the two petals.

(how well you align these determines how neat the center hole in your flower will be)

Continue with the other three petals, until you’ve glued the 5th petal back to the 1st one in the flower!

Then you should have this:

Now it’s just a question of cutting out leaves and gluing them to the bottom of the flower.

I printed out Table numbers on one side of yellow cardstock that I bought from Office Depot - the paper was 110 lb. weight (this stuff, which I also used for our program covers) and I had no problems running it through my printer. I aligned where I had printed table numbers on one side with a very faint outline of the leaf printed on the other side of the cardstock. Then I cut the leaves out with scissors:

(You might be able to see the faint outline printed on this side? On the other side I already printed the Table numbers)

Then from another sheet where I had printed everyone’s name and fit it into the leaf template (this required quite a bit of creative font sizing and jiggling the text around for each person to fit and center their first and last names on a leaf), I cut out a leaf with a name. I glued the name leaf on top of the Table number leaf with a little bit of overlap, again using a dab of hot glue.

(I Photoshopped the info onto these because I only had Table number leaves printed out!)

Then I just spread a bit more glue on the end of the glued-together leaves and stuck them to the bottom of the flower!

(And actually, be a bit more careful with leaf placement, so that they don’t go over the edges of the bottom of the petal like mine did with the leaf on the right here)

I did try several other leaf shapes but found that they either made the flower look like it had wings, or looked far too busy with the flower design, so I stuck to my original plan of a simple long leaf. Also even though there is a hole at the bottom of each petal, I found that it didn’t really bother me. If it annoys you, you could always cut out a circle to glue over the bottom of the flowers and glue the leaves to that.

If you’d like the template for the leaves I made/used, you can download the Illustrator file here, or the JPG version here. Just beware that the leaves are not perfect, because I drew them myself in Illustrator and I don’t really actually know what I’m doing.

And that’s it! Now repeat times number of guests, and you should end up with this:

(Photo copyright Amy Deputy Photography)

And thus concludes the longest tutorial on the face of the planet! Whew. Hope someone out there finds it useful!