Flowers of One Garden Tutorial

Look at these beautiful flowers, representing the Garden of Humanity that were created by a sweet group of about ten kindergartners, 1st graders and 2nd graders at Ethel Clossen Baha'i School in Chester County PA last Sunday. The idea behind the project was that we were creating a bouquet to give to an assisted living facility nearby.

How did we make them? There was some preparation beforehand, because it was a young group, and we basically had an hour together. Older kids could do more of this project themselves.

Materials: Any kind of papers including scrapbook papers, wrapping papers, pages cut from books, menus, wall paper newspapers with different languages, basically any kind of paper!

Scissors, glue sticks and extra thin pipe cleaners.

A 1/16" hole punch, alot smaller than the ones we usually use. Can be found at any craft store.

Magazines with people's faces in them.

Flower templates - make them yourselves

Flower templates are made by drawing flower shapes and a leaf shape onto a piece of card stock. I printed a few copies of them onto card stock, and cut them out for the younger kids to use as templates. Older kids could make their own templates, directly onto card stock to use. The faces were cut from magazines, using a spool of thread as a circle template. Place the spool over the head, trace around it and then cut out the head. For these younger kids, I cut out faces and glued them down and printed up a few copies on regular paper. Older kids can pick their own faces directly from magazines. The younger kids just cut the faces out from the papers I printed.

We used the the flower templates to trace the flower petals onto the assorted papers, then punched 16" holes in the centers. We threaded the flowers through the pipe cleaners, one by one, largest first then medium and then small. Once all the flower shapes were on the pipe cleaner, we bent the tip of the pipe cleaner over to keep the flowers from sliding off. Then we glued the faces, right on top of where the pipe cleaners were bent over. Leaves were added by folding them over the pipe cleaners a couple of times, at the smallest end place, and glueing into place.

The kids worked together knowing that these flowers were going to be given to the senior citizens. We spent a good deal of time talking about service, about how good it feels to make beautiful things and give them away. The kids were very excited at the thought of how happy these flowers would make people feel when they saw them.

So one by one, the garden grew, and turned into a beautiful bouquet.

This inspired presentation represents the diverse world of humanity.

We are truely flowers of one garden.

Note: I have several books on making flowers with paper. Some of the inspiration for this project came from a delightful book

on making paper flowers by Sandra Evertson called Fanciful Paper Flowers.

I just discovered that she has a wonderful blog too!

http://sandraevertson.blogspot.com/