I was asked to make a card/something nice for a friend of the family who turns 60 this week (her knees-up will be this weekend). What to do? What to do? What to doooooooo? Her party will be themed and all the guests were asked to wear outfits inspired by Asia with bright colours (think Indian Summer) so I thought that might inspire me – cue going through my paper stacks for hot pinks, bright yellows, vivid blues and jewel-like greens… Still no clue what to do…
Then I went flicking through other card making blogs and saw an ‘exploding box’ with lots of flowers – flowers… She loves flowers and is a keen gardener, ah-ha I think I knew what to do at last… so the blog that I saw this box on said that their inspiration came from Elaine’s ‘Magic Boxes’ and that she had a blog, so I went to the source: Magic Boxes blog.
The creations on her blog are just amazing – do scroll through all of her creations, because they are stunning! Anyway as I was merrily scrolling through I saw two boxes to give inspiration:
2. Origami box shown on Create and Craft (I liked the colour sceme of this one as it’s quite Chinese – red and black)
So with two types of box and some possible colour schemes I started to think…
Our friend loves Orchids & manages to keep them healthy for years (she even resuscitates ours when they look a bit upset) so I thought that orchids would be the right flowers for her box. Great, at last something to go on, but wait – how do you make a paper orchid?
So some more rummaging on the internet & I found these: Leone Em Pty Ltd Orchid punches – RESULT!!! But the punches don’t come cheap… so I bought both the Cymbidium and Moth orchid punches so I could make several orchids, but was confused about which bit went where – the book from the company who made the punches was >£10!!!! Having already forked out a considerable sum on the punches I wasn’t going to spend even more on an instruction book, so I turned to youtube – nothing! I spent AGES typing all sorts of combinations of ‘orchid’ ‘Leone Em’ ‘flower punch’ and with almost no success… I was SO disappointed. Then I stumbled upon a crafting forum thread started by someone in exactly my position and someone had replied ‘you need to stamp more than once to get the right number of petals’ BINGO! I picked up the bits and experimented and after a few false starts I ended up with something I thought didn’t look half bad. So if you want to create orchids with the punches but don’t want to pay for the official instructions, read on (the official instructions include other flowers that can be made with the punches, so would still be a good buy if you want to create lots of other hand-made flowers)
Punch twice for enough petals – you will need two of petal 1 and petal 2. First of all, colour everything before assembling on both the front and back. Leave to dry. If you will be using glue, test a piece of paper you have already coloured to make sure the colouring doesn’t bleed or warp before you start (I used double sided tape).
First take shape 4. The two ‘spurs’ on shape 4 are gluing sections – where you should attach your petals, so try to keep these at the centre of the orchid. Shape the petal so that the two ‘wings’ face upwards and the tongue of the orchid faces out and down, the upper part of the orchid should face out over the top of the tongue.
Round the edges of shape 5 so it curls up, then glue petal 5 in the middle of petal 4 as the ‘tongue’ of the orchid.
Take two petals 2 and attach to the ‘spurs’ or gluing sections of shape 4, making sure the shapes are mirror images of each other.
Next take two petals 1 and attach over the top of petals 2 using the small gluing section at the base of the petal.
Attach one petal 3 to the back of the orchid.
Perform any additional shaping that is required.
I hope that helps – I will be posting about the whole box very soon. Happy crafting!!
rustyblue85 