Ever since my dad was diagnosed with cancer in 2003, our family has been involved with American Cancer Society. We attended our first Relay for Life and he walked as a survivor a few months after being diagnosed with brain cancer. After his death in 2004 my mom was on the board for the local Relay for years, I helped run the event at College of Charleston from 2006-2010 and have volunteered at our local Hope Lodge. My sister now works at ACS so we’ve enjoyed learning about the newer initiatives and continuing to be involved. Needless to say cancer, and the American Cancer Society are very close to our family.
When my sister and brother in law visited us back in October, Lauren wanted to make a bouquet of paper flowers for her desk at work and also some additional flowers for her team as a thank you for their hard work. I was excited to make my first paper flower project and put my Cricut Maker to the test!
This Giving Tuesday I’m excited to share some of my personal ACS story, as well as our paper flower DIY project for some of the hard working employees at American Cancer Society!
Note: This post contains affiliate links, so if you purchase something from them a little bit goes back to help support my blog!
DIY Paper Daisies
What you’ll need:
- 2 pieces red 12″ x 12″ card stock
- 2 pieces blue 12″ x 12″ card stock
- 2 pieces white 12″ x 12″ card stock
- 1 piece green 12″ x 12″ card stock
- Cricut Maker
- Scoring tool
- Scissors
- Hot glue gun
- Hot glue
- Pack of 20 gauge floral wire
- Wire cutters
- Floral tape
- Color printer
- Baker’s twine
If you haven’t seen what Lia Griffith can make with paper then you need to check her out. Her paper bouquets from the Cricut Mountain Makeathon were our inspiration for this project.
Okay, to start I found a daisy image on Google, saved it to my computer and imported it in Design Space as a “cut image.”
I also found a leaf image and a price tag star burst image that I uploaded and saved as cut files then added them to my canvas. These three shapes were what we needed to create all pieces of the flower. I copied the daisy image, changed the color and shrunk the image. This would become the middle of the flower.
Next I added 9 score lines down the petals of the daisy (1 per petal). The Cricut would score these when cutting (way better than manually doing this as we learned from the first few flowers) and make it easy to fold them and create some depth when putting the flower together. Make sure to select all of the score lines and the flower and attach them all together so they will stay in place on your design when you’re cutting. Then I copied this flower twice, and shrunk one of those images by 1/2″, so you’ll have 2 large flowers and 1 slightly smaller flower shape.
I also copied the star burst shape and changed one color to green and one to yellow like the middle piece. I shrunk the size of the yellow one to fit the middle of the yellow flower shape.
PS – You can access my project in Design Space here.
At the end of all of uploading, resizing, adjusting and coloring images this is what my canvas looked like:
Now I was ready to start cutting. After some trial and error (we made a lot of these flowers) I learned you could get the petals for 2 flowers on 1 mat – yay! Originally it put them on two, but if you click the … at the top left of an image you can choose to move it to another mat. I moved the 2 from the second mat to the first, rearranged things a little and boom – better use of paper!
Place your scoring tool in the Maker’s clamp A and the fine point blade in clamp B. Place the card stock on your mat according to what you’re cutting first & start cutting! You’ll repeat the process for all the different colors (inside of flower and back of flower).
Tip: If you change the color of the items to match your card stock, then it’ll separate them correctly by mat and help keep you straight.
When the cutting is done, carefully remove the pieces from your mat, pulling the mat away from the cardstock. Even the excess card stock looked pretty!
Slightly fold the flower petals on the score line and use the top edge of scissors to curl the ends of the inside of your flower. As we were doing this for all the flowers, Cleo wanted in on the action..
Now we need to make the stems and backing! The length of the wire in the pack was too long for the vase Lauren was putting her bouquet in, so we cut them in half and then cut a few slightly longer. Put 3 of the wires together and wrap the floral tape around all 3, leaving about 1/2″ untaped at the top.
Poke a hole in the middle of the green starburst piece and put it through the top where the 3 wires aren’t wrapped. Separate the 3 wires evenly and fold them so they lay flat against the paper. This is what everything will look like:
Continue this for the rest of the stems you need for your flowers. You’ll hot glue 3 of the petal pieces (2 big, 1 slightly smaller) on top of each other, alternating so the petals don’t all line up. Finish it by gluing the white piece on the top.
Finally, glue the stem to the back of the flower. Once you have a few, put them together to create your bouquet!
As I mentioned, Lauren also wanted to some to her team as a gift, so we decided to create tags for each one with the American Cancer Society logo on the front and blank so she could write on them.
To create some custom tags, I first downloaded the ACS logo. Then I uploaded just the shape of the logo into Design Space to be the shape of the tag and changed the color to white. Next, I uploaded the logo again, but saved it as a ‘print then cut’ image and added to to my tag. I added some text in the same ACS brand font with the slogan of a current campaign Lauren was working on: Attacking Cancer from Every Angle.
Select the tag shape, logo and text and flatten them (for print then cut functionality). Next, insert a circle, and resize it to be small and attach it to the tag so it’d be cut out and we could thread twine through it later. Now select and attach all the items so they’ll first print and then be cut correctly. Duplicate the tag as many times as you need, then print on white card stock, put the card stock on your mat and cut the tag shape with your Maker!
These came out better than I imagined and looked so professional! The last step for Lauren was to write on the back of the tags and then loop some twine through the hole and tie the tag to the flower’s stem. She gave them out to her team and it sounds like everyone liked the homemade gift!
I hope you enjoy the paper daisy DIY today and also consider connecting with American Cancer Society this Giving Tuesday! They are trying to raise $1 million dollars today to attack cancer from every angle and the best part is that MasterCard is matching donations made through their site, so your donation would be doubled! (Click here to learn more)
As a daughter, granddaughter and friend of many cancer fighters, ACS is an organization that I will always support, especially after seeing the different ways they help patients first hand.
Happy Giving Tuesday everyone 🙂
