Paper Roses with an old and still useful punch! -With Awesome Tutorial!

I was looking on you tube at a few tutorials for making paper roses, and almost all require you to cut your paper with a Cricut/Expensive machine, or even a Big Shot/Die cutter (I have one and the dies I could use), however I wanted to do a tutorial to show that even if all you have a is a punch, you can still make them and they turn out just as beautiful!

I Started with an EK success paper shaper I've had for years! The blossoms it punches out are about 2.5 inches in width, perfect for my projects. I don't want my roses too big, but any smaller might be harder to work with.

I then cut out 4, where most tutorials did three, I like my roses a little fuller and 4 gives me the right amount of layers for these roses.

The next step is to cut each one up, as you can see you get the layers that go from one to 5 petals.  Each one fits right onto the next when we get to the gluing process.

I then use a skewer (you can also use a little paint brush end or a pencil, to curl my pieces, you can see some are curled lengthwise, the other just curled under, the paper pattern gives them dimension (I used some old K and Co paper I had on hand) and I love the vintage look too.

Once this was done, I went and used the hot glue gun because it's fast and super easy, just don't burn yourself.

I did one layer at a time carefully adding just a tiny dab of glue, since it's easier to add more where needed rather than try to remove a big glob of it.

I don't worry too much about the threads of glue just yet, I generally clean up my stuff with tweezers after. Once you have layers all glued and folded and curl how you want them, you can trim the back end, and use a glue dot to adhere to your project.

I used stickles on mine, since they will go one some of my Christmas and Victorian looking ornaments.

You can see in the picture that a rose made with 3 punches doesn't look as pretty as the next one (darker one) made with 4 punches. I am gonna go punch out a few more and cut and get them ready, great to do while watching TV!

Cheers, have fun crafting!
Viviana

A Telegram Postcard for PFF!

I'm not sure if you l can read the back, but it was sent to a Miss Mabel Lamp, March 5, 1910 at 7:30 am. The author, M.H. (also a Mabel) writes to ask Miss Mabel to meet at a show,....back when very few people had phones, and postcards or telegrams were the fastest way to reach someone. I found it lovely that the author asks to make sure you write back, "make sure you answer this postal and if not, make sure and meet me". From the sounds of it, Mabel will take the quarter past 6 train and will reach her destination (South Schenectady, NY) by 7 o'clock. I looked the places up on google and found they are about 30km apart, so that makes sense. Ballstone Spa looks like a charming little place, with a National Bottle Museum!



Hope all is well with everyone today. It's looking like a gorgeous day out there, can't wait to get started!
Enjoy PFF, and don't forget to head over to The Best Hearts Are Crunchy to see who else has linked a postcard this Friday!

Lovely Bunch for PFF

For a Mrs. Stella Bardwell, 1910, from her Aunt Anna, a very sweet and kind letter. What I do love most is the time people took back then to write each other, because not everyone had a phone, there was no internet and this really was text messaging....I wish we were as civilized!!



Have a lovely PFF day! BTW, you have to excuse the Thursday post for a PFF, I will be away from the computer tomorrow, so I have to do it earlier. Thanks for looking!!!

Finally....it took me about 15 tries.

I have finally found my background. I love the green blue agains the pink that is usually in my pictures. What do you think? It came from Hot Bliggitty Blogs, they have hundreds of great ones too. So there are different parts of my blog from different places, you can click on the buttons to get linked up, here's the list, Shabby Blogs, Cutest Blog on The Block, The Background Fairy and now Hot Bliggitty Blogs!!! All awesome, All had something I liked.

Cheers and have a happy Friday.
Viviana