Nothing heralds the beginning of spring quite like clouds of pink cherry blossoms arching overhead. I love to stand under cherry trees and watch the little petals flutter to the ground like a cascade of candy-colored rain.

To celebrate these delicate and short-lived blossoms, I’ve put together a cherry blossom paper flower tutorial that will bring a piece of spring into your home. These cheerful, tiny blooms are exactly what my home needs after a long, chilly winter. I can’t wait to share it with you!

I’ve been passionate about paper cherry blossoms for a long time. A few years ago I even created six cherry blossom installations for stores around Seattle—which you can read more about here. Even after cutting thousands of those little petals, I’m still in love with these beauties.

That’s why I’ve worked hard to bring you an easy to use cherry blossom tutorial that will guide you every step of the way. I want to share the love!

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When you mention crepe paper, most people outside of our paper flower world think of party streamers or tissue paper. If you’ve been a paper florist for any amount of time, you know that crepe paper comes in a staggering array of options that the general public is unaware of. The structure and intricacy you can coax out of crepe is incredible and truly an art form.

Crepe paper has been around since the late 19th century, and inventive crafters like ourselves have been making beautiful art from crepe for just as long. Now, our paper flower industry is growing like crazy, and it’s easier than ever to find buy crepe from around the world in many different varieties.

But with so many options, you may feel overwhelmed by which crepe to choose—but not anymore.

I’m here to share the crepe knowledge I’ve gleaned from years of being a paper florist and educator, all in one easy to read post. By the end, you’ll learn everything you need to know about...

If you’re a crafter or any kind of florist, you’ve probably encountered floral wire. Floral wire can be used for a vast array of purposes: reinforcing weak stems, securing wreaths or bows, or even manipulating the wire to be an artwork of its own. And, of course, it can be used to form and support paper flowers.

But which gauge should you use? And which form? Painted and paddle? Naked stems?

Standing in the aisle of your favorite craft store, you may have felt a little overwhelmed as you browsed the options. I remember that feeling when I first started out. 

To save you from the time and trouble of experimenting, this article will help you feel confident when choosing florist wire. You’ll learn everything you need to know about gauge and form, as well as which wires I use for my paper flower projects. With this knowledge, your paper flowers will be easier to make and turn out beautifully.

What Is Floral Wire?

 Before we dive into which...

The yule log (or Buche de Noel in French) has a fascinating history. It’s a custom that is believed to have originated in European pagan midwinter festivals, in which communities would come together to light bonfires in celebration of the shortest day of the year and the longer days to come. Over time, this tradition evolved, and it became customary to burn a huge log in the fireplace to create a bright, warm, cozy Christmas celebration. Today, it’s easy to forget that your average peasant wouldn’t have had access to much light during those longer winter nights. Wood takes time and effort to gather, and candles cost money. To fill a night with blazing light would have seemed like a rare luxury.

You may be more familiar with the yule log, (or Buche de Noel in French), as a sometimes elegant, sometimes delightfully quirky holiday desert. Imaginative bakers decorate frosted sponge cake rolls to look like logs, often adorning the beautiful cakes with meringue...

For November’s paper flower tutorial, Quynh assigned me the happy task of creating a magnolia tutorial. The goal for this project was to create a magnolia branch that was small enough to arrange easily with other flowers, but that would still allow us to pack on a lot of blooms and buds. My first thought was to simply scale down a standard pink magnolia, but I became interested in the idea of creating a dwarf specimen with crepe. Often, dwarf varieties of plants are less willowy and elongated, and more dense and packed-in. What would that look like for a magnolia?

I turned to Pinterest and found magnolia bonsai images with thick, twisty, ancient-looking bark, and I became obsessed with recreating that gnarled, weathered, and mossy effect. Several partial branches later, I settled on a few texture and color techniques that I think really elevate this paper flower tutorial. 

But to me, the cherry on top of this piece is the little fuzzy green buds that are waiting to open....

Happy October! I’ve been daydreaming about this month’s tutorial all year. Mushrooms have a special place in my heart, and I’ve been dying to create one for The Posey Box. They’re a bold and fun departure from our usual paper flowers!

Usually, when Quynh and I are planning a tutorial, we’ll choose a flower and then a specific variety and color of that flower to recreate in crepe paper. But for this month’s project, I really wanted to design a paper mushroom around my favorite mushroom attributes. I wanted to make a variety with chunky and very realistic gills, dramatically shaped caps, and the ability to actually glow. The world of mushrooms is so huge that this exact mushroom might be growing in a forest somewhere as we speak, but the truth is that Quynh and I invented this species just for our members. 

 Hopefully any mycologists out there will be forgiving once they make one of these fun mushrooms. We hope you have a blast with it...

The dahlia mania is still going strong here at The Posey Box, and we brought in a real, live dahlia expert to help you make your paper flowers even more lifelike! Last week, we invited Jesalyn Pettigrew to chat with our members about this colorful, amazing flower, and we loved every minute of it.

First of all, a little about Jesalyn. She is a single mom to two young boys, and in 2015 she founded Mossy Gate Flower Farm. She started her garden on just 50 square feet, using it to help with a difficult life transition—I know many of you paper florists came to our craft for similar reasons and understand well the joy that creating can bring. 

Jesalyn’s hobby soon grew into a passion, and even though gardening and farming weren’t in her wheelhouse, she learned the ins and outs of the wholesale cut flower farm industry. She now farms over two acres and is the first flower farm for the Puget Sound Food Hub Coop, is a founding member of Genuine Skagit Valley, and was...

Dahlias are one of the most interesting flowers to make from paper. They come in so many drastically different varieties, ranging from very tiny delicate balls to bold flowers the size of dinner plates. Some look like colorful fireworks, others like sea creatures and still others like a honeycomb. One of the reasons for all this diversity of form is actually in the dahlia’s genes. Most plants have two sets of chromosomes. Dahlias have eight. This allows for more genetic combinations and variations, which is why cultivars of the same flower can vary so dramatically.

That jewel-like color and luster of dahlia petals also have a scientific explanation.

The visual intensity is partly to compensate for the fact that dahlias don’t attract pollinators using scent but only color. While a rose might lure a bee by using a sweet perfume, a grassy-smelling dahlia must rely on its good looks.

To tackle this amazing paper flower tutorial, I left the blooms to Quynh. She has...

Last month we have had so much fun creating peonies with our Posey Box members. One of the great things about peonies is how colorful and varied they can be! They can range from pale and delicate to bold and bright, and many varieties feature beautiful blends of colors on their petals. 

We’ve extolled the virtues of Design Master before, and we’re singing their praises again after this month’s tutorial. It’s incredible how realistic you can make your paper flowers with the right application of color. 

In our July study group, we chatted with our longtime friend from Design Master, Jodi Duncan. She gave us all sorts of incredible information about using Design Master, particularly about color shifting. The phrase is fairly self explanatory, but it means that you can change the color of your paper or flower by using some color knowhow. This isn’t always an easy skill to learn for some people, so here are some basics to get you started.

It wasn’t until I started working on this month’s tutorial that I realized sunflowers are one of my favorite flowers. As a child, I loved the magic of planting a little striped seed in the spring and by late summer having an eight foot monster of a plant bursting with seeds for birds and field mice. I have happy memories of playhouses built from sunflower stalks and morning glory vines, and of the colorful cut bunches, my parents would buy at the farmers market.

 I’m always happy to see the traditional sunflower with the fuzzy brown center fill up grocery stores in the summer, but it’s the bold weirdo varieties that capture my heart. I love the strange misshapen seed heads, the intricate patterns of seeds and florets, and the way the petals can be both scraggly and elegant at the same time. I’m sorry to say that I spent a truly crazy amount of time trying to decide how to do a center with a delicate spiral of thousands of seeds that another human...