Spring decor: Tissue paper flowers

Recently The Nester reminded me that the time for spring decorating had come. I pulled out one thing that I made about two years ago:  a floppy pink pom-pom made out of strips from an old T-shirt. That was the only spring-y decoration I had.

But an importer* of cheap Chinese party decorations has been sending us catalogs, and what mostly stands out to me in them are the paper lanterns and large fluffy paper balls. I had put "paper lantern" on my things-to-make list, and intended to use some tissue paper that I had saved. But with the Spring theme, I decided to use the tissue paper for flowers instead.

I ended up making three different versions, all basically constructed in the same way:

1.  With one sheet of pink tissue paper, I cut it into three long strips, of different widths, and cut flower petal tips along one edge of each strip. Then, starting with the narrowest strip and ending with the widest, I carefully rolled them up, into a fair imitation of a rose, securing it at the stem with twine when I finished.

2.  With one sheet of purple tissue paper, I folded it lengthwise, then cut the long (unfolded) edges with scissors to make a fringe. Again, I rolled it up, and this time tied it at the "stem" with tape. 

3.  The remaining three sheets of tissue paper were white.  I experimented with painting them, with red acrylic paint and water to make pink streaks, and found that it came out...streaky, as I was trying to mix the paint and water right on the tissue paper, and it wasn't holding up well. Mixing them off the paper and using a much wider brush, I could have covered more of the paper than I did.

After the paint dried, I cut each sheet into three long strips, folded and cut each strip to make a fringe just like I did with the purple paper, and started rolling them up.

This time, though, I had more strips to work with, and I decided to alternate them so that the fringe stuck out on both sides of the "stem".

When I finished rolling them all up, and tied them with a string in the middle, and fluffed out the fringe a bit, it made a poofy, fluffy paper flower ball just like the ones in the catalog...except that it needed a little trimming where a few ends stuck out too far. Which I gave it.

I hung it up in the living room, close enough to the hanging lamp that it made its fabric cover look drab. So then I started experimenting with putting a different fabric on it, but that wasn't quite right either...so I'm still working on that one.

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*Now a Berkshire Hathaway company!!  I find that very amusing.