The Inaugural Post-- And a Tutorial!

I had big ambitions when I started this blog about sharing my various craft projects, but unfortunately time got away from me, and here I am writing the first post months after I created it… but here I am. I’m a soon-to-be college junior, studying textile and apparel management, with aspirations of someday going into costume design. I love crafting with children, and in my spare time at school I help lead a Sewing Club at an after school program, and during the summer I work as the arts and crafts director at a girl scout camp near my house-- thus the rationale for creating the following project.

Flower Photo Holder Tutorial

You will need:

• Cardstock (for flowers)
• Chopsticks, wooden skewers, pencils… anything stem like
• A disposable cup (or, if you have a nicely shaped one, a bottle)
• Glue(I used a glue gun and tacky glue and a glue stick, but most glues could be adapted for any of my purposes)
• Yarn
• Paper clips
• Rice, clay, salt dough, or some other substrate to weight down your vase and hold the flowers up

1. Create some flowers! I just pieced mine pretty simply out of card-stock… they can be as elaborate or as simple as you want/have time for. You want to use some sturdy card-stock, though, so they can hold up to the end use.

2. Paint your stems green. I hoard chopsticks from the dining hall at my school all year long so campers can use them, but I ended up sawing them both because they were a bit high and too uniform for my liking. Feel free to add leaves, or not.

3. Glue the stick onto the back of the flower, not allowing the stick to cover more than half of it. (you need room for a paperclip on there.)
4. I missed photographing this, but this is really a pretty simple project so it’s probably unnecessary. Glue a paperclip above the stem. This will hold the photograph. I was thinking later that a teeny clothespin might do a better job (the paperclip might distort a photo) but I don’t have any, and paper clips are cheaper for a camp budget anyway.

5. You could decorate your pot/vase any way you wanted to, but I opted to wrap variegated yarn all around it. You could achieve a neat striped effect by using two colors of yarn at once, which I intended to do but opted not to when I found the variegated.
6. Place a substrate in your vase. At camp, I would probably have the kids help me whip up a batch of salt dough, but I didn’t feel motivated at home (and I would have had a lot left over) so I just poured some rice in. A little messier, but it does the job. I might replace it with dough at camp, but it really doesn’t matter.
7. Place in photos and voila! A beautiful, customized photo-holder. (note the completely camp appropriate photos, necessary for any camp prototype.)