A lovely new craft blogger to visit!

Hello dear friends,

I'm sharing a very special blog with you today....one I hope you will visit and leave a kind word of encouragement on. You see, this beautiful and creative young woman is not only a clever new blogger and Etsy shop owner...but she's also the love of my son's life.. and the daughter I never had!

So please go over to Paper Trips and look at Lotti's unique paper flower arrangements..many of them based on the wonderful and intricate techniques of Japanese origami and made with exquisite Japanese papers. If you enjoy paper crafts I'm sure you'll love what she is doing, too!

blessings..Trish xx

     Bouquet Pride! Sorry that I look so smug in this picture. It's a pyramid bouquet! It's just, I'm practically a pharaoh now. A confused pharaoh with little understanding of the Law of Gravity, admittedly.


      So in keeping with the 'envirosolution' inventing, I was searching for a way to create a piece in any shape I, or a customer, may want a piece in and also a way to keep the weight and materials usage down. This structure is a wire frame covered with pretty, colour matching calendar covers and then flowers and curled triangles to replicate dark blue leaves. The cover pages of calendars are surprisingly strong, but I also covered the calendar walls with some hand painted paper for a little extra. The stem is a cardboard tube covered with a matching calendar page. 

      I've found this to be an effective structure, so I'll be creating more as time goes on. Obviously, not everybody wants an upside down pyramid bouquet- yes, it's very sad and no, I don't understand it either- so more shapes to come. Maybe even an upside-up pyramid bouquet! If you have a suggestion, please feel free to put in either a real or imaginary order with me through the CHALLENGE page.


This photo shows how the bouquet unwittingly matches my spring-summer garden blooms. Yes, for all our international visitors, Australia is in the Southern Hemisphere and we are experiencing summer while much of the rest of humanity freezes. Just remember, the seaweed is always greener in somebody else's lake.

The majority of flowers on this bouquet are twisty roses. These are the simplest version of twisty roses, where each visible fold is clearly defined. A more complex version of these roses is displayed in another blog post in the gallery of photos.

Floristry using natural flowers or fake silk flowers usually employs the attached green leaves as fillers. In the absence of those, I create new papery methods for that. For this bouquet, I have used simple curled triangular leaves and also soft yellow paper tubes- again, avoiding waste of paper in a pretty and effective way.

I'm aiming to sell this particular piece to a lumberjack, so this is an example to whet the floral appetite of any lumberjacks who may be reading my website.

The metallic pink squarish blossom shown here is my creation, for filling in particular gaps, adding spots of colour and using up scraps of beloved paper. On the three yellow roses and one pink, the gold inked lining is just visible.

That gorgeous Japanese calendar has given so much! This picture is of pink flower bursts hanging over yellow sandy beaches and blue-white waves. The picture formed the basis of the montage for this bouquet.

The bouquet has a fairly flat top. It's not a common look, but it sure makes it easy to rest the bouquet safely without damaging the flowers! It's quite important in a bouquet that you want lasting a long time.

Follow this link to read more fun-loving and clever craft posts from :
http://papertrips.jimdo.com/