Great Minds...

Wow, two posts in two days? What has gotten in to me? ;)

I'm back to share another Christmas gift that I put together for a friend this year.

Have you guys seen the rolled flower dies that MFT sells? As soon as I saw them, I began dreaming of all the fun things I could make with flowers... and all the fun materials I could make the flowers out of. I was putting together some other Christmas gifts featuring old book pages, which inspired today's gift.



There is something about these old book flowers that just look so romantic and pretty, isn't there?

To make the flowers, I ran the MFT rolled rose die through my Cricut about a zillion times. Well, not really a zillion, but I think the ball took about 40 roses to fill it, and that seemed to take forever (though not nearly as long as my insane project for my mother, which I'll post next time).

I put about 3 sheets of book paper together before running it through, to give the flowers lots of ruffles and a little stability. If you don't have a Cricut or the die, you can just cut spirals out of paper and make the flowers yourself, but that would take FOREVER (which is the fantastic thing about having a die and a machine to do all the work!). Anyhow, once they were cut out, I rolled them and then hot glued them on a styrofoam ball. You have to use a low temp glue, so you don't melt the ball. :) Before gluing the top roses on, I added a loop of twine to hang it by and glued the flowers on top of it to secure it. Once they were all glued on, I added pearl-headed corsage pins to the center of each flower and tied a rustic-looking canvas "ribbon" on top. The "ribbon" is actually a scrap of curtain I had left over from hemming my Ikea curtains. Thrifty, eh?

Here's a close-up:



Funny story... I was planning on sharing this project today, anyway. As chance would have it, yesterday I was perusing my long list of blog favs and came across this post. Now honestly, what are the chances? :) I guess that proves that there's only so much that you can do with paper! I have to admit that while I was making the book ball, I was daydreaming about how it would look dressed up in patterned paper. And now I know! Isn't Kerry's ball totally fab? I guess it's true that great minds think alike! ;) (You should check out the rest of her blog if you haven't already -- she's an amazing paper crafter and a good stamping buddy!).

Well, I'm off to try an get some other things accomplished. Enjoy your day! :)