How to Make Paper Geraniums

The kit contains: 2 pre-made flower domes, coloured to match your flowerets, 50-60 tiny blossoms, 12 geranium leaves, and 9 short wires. (You may not need to use all the tiny blossoms.)

You will need: tacky-type glue, ball stylus, foam pad, tweezers, and planting medium, either a pot, window box or garden plot. Optional supplies include green colouring pencil, white or yellow gel pen (if you are putting centres in coloured geraniums).

Leaves:

1. Bend top 1/8" (3 mm) of your short wires at a right angle: I use the tip of my tweezers to create this bend.
2. Optional: With your green colouring pencil, draw a dark partial circle on the upper side of each leaf, as for zonal pelargoniums.
3. Shape leaf  by running your ball stylus around the underside edge of each leaf. Turn over, and gently push the centre with you ball stylus to indent. Fold the little leaf stem downwards. Set aside 3 of the leaves.
4. Dip the narrow bent end of the stem wire in tacky glue, then touch to underside of leaf with the small bend facing in to the leaf centre and the bent stem over the angle. Set aside to dry,

Flower Assembly:

You may find it easier to use the thumb nail of the hand holding the flower head, as a glue palette, as above.

1. Use your ball stylus to round up each tiny floweret.
2. Put a drop of glue handy, and use the tweezers to pick up a blossom, dip in glue, and place on flower dome. How you proceed is up to you; over the top in a row, then fill in the halves, whatever suits you. Set aside to dry. Repeat for the second blossom head. Do NOT cover the base of the dome.
3. Add a reserved leaf to each flower stem.

Planting:

1. Whether you plant in a pot, window box or garden, the method is the same. Trim your flower head stems to fit and plant in the centre of your planting area.
2. Plant stemmed leaves around the flower stems, cutting to suit your planting area.
3. Glue the last reserved leaf on any obvious bare spot.
4. When thoroughly dry, bend flower heads and leaf stems gently to make plant come alive.

That's it for the how to. It appears that I quite forgot to bend my wires before taking the first of the photos! I used white blossoms and added a coloured centre with a marker pen. You can also make a tiny white or yellow centre for your coloured blossoms. Geraniums come in so many colours that you could plant a whole, colourful garden just with them!

My flower domes are made of Crayola Model Magic, into which are glued paper-covered flower stems. The domes are painted to match the blossom colour chosen.

Now I am going to eat, and then I will experiment a little more with paper petunia plants. I am trying to see how dampening the flowers interacts with water-soluble marker ink....

There is another tutorial for paper geraniums in August of 2015, with more photos, that you might want to take a look at. There are some slight differences in the number of leaves and petal used on the older tutorial, however.