Roses: Handmade and easy to make.

I've always admired those beautiful handmade paper flowers featured on projects and wondered how to make them. I was inspired to try making some after looking at a Cricut Cartridge packing. It said: "cut and layer them...." and lo and behold! A lightbulb flashed over my head!

Using my cricut "mother's day bouquet" cartridge, I cut out the same flower in various sizes: 1, 1 and 1/4, 1.5, 2, and 2.5 inches.

To make these roses, you don't need to use this cartridge, you can use a scallop punch, or even hand draw flowers and cut them out.

After I cut my flowers, I sanded the edges down to make them look worn and to help warp the flowers a bit. Then I used something round (if you don't have any tools, you can use a pen or a pencil) and wrap the petals around them to curl them.

Now all you need to do is arrange all of the flowers from largest to smallest and stick each layer to the one below it. I used glue dots.

Afterward, I took the smallest flower  and folded it, rolled it up so that it looked like a bud. the bottom should look like the bottom of a cone. The end needs to be snipped off so you can adhere the "bud" in the center. When you put them all together, you can fold pieces under so that the flower looks fuller/like it's opening up.

this is what it looks like:

You can do so many things before you glue the flowers together. You can:

emboss them
ink them
spray mist them (that will also help with giving them a nice shape and also true-r color)
glitter them


Here's a rose (the one in black & white) I made to go on a layout I created for ScrapGal. I got some yummy MME Lost & Found papers to work with. I inked mine in red ink.

look at how good it looks next to a pre-fab rose!
There's so many different possibilities with these flowers, I hope you find them as easy to make as I did!