Blooming Blossoms Gift Wrap

Haven't had much time for crafting lately, but I've got a few past projects up my sleeve waiting to be shared ;) So here's one that I think would be perfect for Mother's Day! I made this gift wrap to decorate a birthday gift for my dear friend Rachel. As I've said before, I like to use plain brown postal paper and decorate it instead of buying wrapping paper. I like having the opportunity to get crafty and I also enjoy the challenge of dreaming up a creative way to dress it up.

For Rachel, I wanted to do something pretty and nature-y and I ended up putting together this 3-D flower design! I've done similar things with hearts and butterflies. This concept is definitely adaptable.

Materials:

Plain postal paper (or other wrapping paper)

Card stock

Paper punch in the shape of a flower*
Scissors
Pencil
Glue or adhesive dots**
Optional: embellishments like pearl or jewel stickers

*If you don't have a punch, you could cut out flowers by hand.
**I used foam adhesive dots. The foam dots add some height because they are thick.

-Start by wrapping your gift with the plain paper or wrapping paper.

-Punch out your desired number of flowers. You'll need at least two flower punches for each flower in the finished product. Let's call those "blooms." So to make 4 blooms, I punched out 8 flowers.

-Bend each flower petal up towards the center and crease it just slightly.

-Arrange the flowers. For each bloom, stack two flowers together and turn them so that the petals from the bottom one fill in the gaps between the petals on the top one. For fuller flowers, you could try adding layers, but you might have to start making the top layers smaller. Attach the layers together with glue or other paper adhesive, then attach them to your wrapped package.

- Cut out leaves using scissors. I cut mine freehand, but you could print a leaf shape, cut it out and use it as a tracer. Or freehand draw leaves, then cut them out.

- Curl the leaves around a pencil to give them some dimension as well. Then glue just one end of each leaf to the package, arranging them around the blooms.

Honestly, I'm not totally satisfied with how the leaves turned out. Next time I might crease them down the middle instead of curling them, or maybe just curl them less... But the finished product was still quite pretty!

- Add pearls, jewels or other embellishments to the center of each bloom or around the blooms as you like.

I don't have a picture of it, but I wrote my "Happy Birthday Rachel... Love, Diana" message right on the brown paper around the flowers. It would be cute to add a little gift tag to the bouquet with the To/From.

Have fun, and Happy Mother's Day!!


Here are my previous gift wrap posts if you're interested :)

Brown Paper Packages Tied up with String (4 ways to dress them up for Christmas)

DIY Gift Tags (Embellished gift tags for wine bottles and goody bags)

Turning Two at the Zoo (Turn wrapped presents into habitats for toy animals!)