If you are new here, you may not know that I like making stuff by hand, preferably with upcycled materials. Sometimes these efforts fall short of the mark, and sometimes they turn out pretty damned cute. This is one of the later cases. Look at that pretty flower! And honestly, it’s better looking in person.
Let me show you how it all went down.
Beware: another image-heavy crafting post ahoy!
For several years, I made end of year/holiday season tokens for all my coworkers. It’s something my second manager at this company did every year for a couple of decades, that I adopted as a low-key way to do something kind for everyone. Of course, with COVID, things got off-track for a couple of years–as in, I didn’t do it for 2020 or 2021. 2022 was looking good, except that these are both more labor intensive that I anticipated, and my hands kind of went on strike a couple of times during the process.
But I am nothing if not stubborn, so I persevered, and by Sunday morning I finally had everything cut and ready to assemble–which I did at the office, because transporting the finished forty plus flowers was just not going to happen without casualties.
They are pretty and fairly robust, but all those pointy bits do get tangled and can tear.
Quick backstory: I have been aware of the craft-world penchant for saving the toilet paper roll cardboard cores to upcycle into everything from so-called mini scrapbook albums to cute little boxes. Which, don’t get me wrong, end up looking just lovely and nothing like empty toilet paper rolls, but where I feel the whole ethos of upcycling goes out the window: what’s the point of not letting that one cardboard tube get to the landfill when you spent so much money on expensive designer paper and embellishments?
So while I have saved the flattened rolls for years, I hadn’t found many uses that fit my own idea of what it means to upcycle/recycle/reuse them, until I stumbled across this YouTube channel relatively late last year: Day with DYI. If you scroll down, you’ll notice that the vast majority of the videos (at least up to now) are tutorials for lovely and simple creations that use, for the most part, recycled material (mostly toilet paper rolls) and hot glue. Perfect!
So I grabbed the basic material, got particular inspiration from this video, and started down the road to my own version–which requires the use of craft paints that I bought for my secondborn when they were in grade school–two decades ago. (Yes, my friends, in this house, things are saved and used until they very literally croak.) Below is a partial selection of said paints, where you can see the sorry state of the bottles and, at least in the case of the green and the yellow, how much life is still left in them.
If you watch the inspiration video I linked above, you’ll notice that the crafter free-hands the cuts for both the petals and the leaves. Me, I can’t do that–for one, my brain goes “what?”, and for another, when you are planning on making over forty iterations, a template makes it more likely that the last one will look at least reasonably close to the first one, rather than a half-assed wonky janky mess.
So the first order of business was to create a template, and then start the drawing, cutting, painting, more drawing, and hey, just for fun, more cutting!
Six double petals for each flower, that’s over 250.
Oh, but let us not forget the leaves–two per flower, that’s another 80 plus.
And so I cut and stacked them.
And cut and stacked some more,
And a bit more.
By the time I was done, I had this lovely stack of petals:
(I also had a plastic container with two neat stacks of cut and curled leaves, but I forgot to take a photo of that.)
At any rate, I dragged all my supplies to the office and started assembling my flowers in batches. As soon as one batch was done, I went around dropping them on people’s desks, with a little tag wishing everyone a good new year. (Yes, it was three weeks late for the calendar, but it hit the Lunar New Year, so I went with it.)
And that’s how I used a good many of my accumulated toilet paper roll cardboard cores!
If you made it all the way with me, thank you! I hope you like what you see, maybe be inspired to make something yourself; and I wish you all a good new year!
Her Hands, My Hands 
Wow, just wow! As we say in my Greek ancestors’ tradition: “Bless your hands!”
Oh my, thank you, Kay!
And, wouldn’t you know it, we have a very similar thing in Mexico; we say, “tiene manos benditas” (has blessed hands).
Lovely!
How would you say “has cursed hands”? That’s me. 😦
These are so charming! What a perfect thing for a bleak winter.
My lovely Willa, I refuse to believe you could have cursed anything!
And, thank you!
So cool! I’m always in awe of people that have this kind of vision and talent.
Ditto!
Thank you! (All credit for the vision goes to the original artist, though)