# 5 Colourful garland

Colourful garland can be made from colourful papers or even other materials that you can think of. You may even use old magazines, artificial flowers petals, etc. 

What you need is some colourful papers, some straws, a scissors, thread and a needle.  For kids, you may want to replace the needle and thread with raffia strings. 

Fold the piece of paper into half and from this half, fold the paper again as per above top left picture, where you can then draw a love shape on it. With the scissors, cut the love shape out so you can see the flowers pattern.  Cut more flowers pattern out from different colour papers.  Cut the straws roughly 1 inch or depends whether you want more flowers or lesser flowers.  If you want more flowers, then cut the straws shorter. 

Thread a needle and tie a knot at the end of the thread. Then thread one flower pattern with one straw at a time until you get a long string of it.  As for kids using raffia strings, just cut a little hole at the cross line of the flower pattern and then with the raffia strings just put it through and do the same thing as what we do with the thread.

 

Here it is, the beautiful colourful garland and it's great for a party! 

# 2 Cherry Blossom Flower

This cherry blossom flower is really lovely and presentable especially for Chinese New Year. So me and my little girl did this cherry blossom flowers together and tied on the tree branches. She then made all the tanglungs by herself and hang it on the tree.  I tied some red ribbons and prepared some leaves made from ribbons and here is how it looks like.. Niceeee? Well you can make many things out of this cherry blossom flowers not just for CNY.. am sure you can think of a lot of things from this ^v^

To make the flowers and the leaves, these are the materials that you need; color tissue papers (or you can use other types of paper eg. paper tissue from your local Art shop), green wire, green ribbons, ribbon scissors and wire scissors

Take 2 pieces of different color tissue papers and put on top of each other

Fold it like how you fold a fan at the middle or just accummulate the middle part until you get this ...hmm looks like a ribbon

 Then take a green wire and twine it in the middle and twist it and turn it, so to tighten it. The wire can just be 1/3 of the whole length if you just want to twine it to the tree branch, but if you want to make few stalks of flowers to put into a vase, then you may use the full length.  Use the wire cutter to cut the green wire.

 Above is how it looks like in the middle after twined.

Below, is how it looks like from the side

You may cut it to semi circle to make it smaller , depending on what size you want for your flower. Or you may even use your hands to just tear it ..this way it looks more like a flower ^v^

 This is how it looks after tearing it

Next, is to open up your little cherry blossom flower, softly ..layer by layer starting from the middle and finally to the outer layer and adjust it like a round shape

 Finally, till you get this 

How to make the leaves for your tree? Well just use the green ribbon and cut it out to be in this shape below and put the small little wire on it (if your ribbon is shinny on one side only, then put the wire on that side)

Then twine it the same way you twin the flower

These little ribbon leaves can then be added to your little tree or just twine it on the stalk of flower and you can finish up the stalk of flower with green tape

You can do a bunch of flowers for your vase, or make a little small one to stick on a birthday card, or just decorate your church with all these lovely flowers!  it's just inexpensive, but you just need some time to do it and enjoy the whole thing! ^v^

Look at the below,  you can even add a little butterfly to beautify your blossom flower plant

# 1 Paper cup flowers

Let's start with this simple paper cup flowers. These are the items you need ~ paper cup, scissors, color pen. 

Cut a straight line until there's 1 inch left at the bottom of the cup.  Repeat this by leaving 0.5 inch space between the lines.  If you would like to put some items into this flower cup, then ensure that you do not cut until too deep to the bottom.

This is how it'll look like.  Press all the paper downwards like this:

Then twist one of the paper to the back of the next paper beside:

 Repeat it till you finished all of them:

So you can see the flower is done and you just need to do some colouring on it, as you like or even put some ribbons for deco:

(Flower on the left is done by my little girl, age 6 and was given to my dear friend)

Or even have a play with your kids like this :) they'll just enjoy this

(Put a satay stick with cello tape at the back of the cup and you can have a standing flower)

With this, you can also create a bunch of them with beautiful colors in a plant pot as a gift. So the next time after using a paper cup, just don't throw it, but wash it and keep it for this ..support recycling :)