Squish and Glue Flowers: Converting old Primas

With the advent of Spring I get an incredible urge to clean out the clutter. I sell my children's out grown clothing, donate their old toys, tidy up the yard and yes even attack my crafting space. Part of decluttering my craft room involves repurposing my stash. I have a rule - if I haven't used or even thought about using a product within a year I have to either sell it or make it into something I will use. Otherwise all the junk piles up and drives me nutty. I thought I would share with you some of the new ways I am using stash items over the next few weeks.

Today I am sharing how to repurpose old Prima flowers. My girls call them "squish and glue flowers" and they are so easy my 5 and 8 year olds can do the basic version without help.

I have ton of these old flat Prima flowers - the ones that look like daises and come in a hundred different sizes and colors. I don't use them anymore because I am now drawn to the more dimensional flower types out there on the market today. Here is how to spruce those old blah Primas into something a bit more wowser!

Don't forget to stop by on Friday for the My Pink Stamper blog hop - I put together something extra special for the post!

SUPPLIES

Prima Flat Flowers
Aleene's Tacky Glue
Scissors
VersaMark Ink
Flower Punch (for the leaves)
Green Cardstock
A Stylus






THE HOW TO'S

1. Sort your flowers by size, shape and color. As each repurposed flower requires 3 or 4 flat flowers this will help you to choose how best to build your flowers. It will also expedite the process to be organized up front.













2. Apply a nice dollop of the tacky glue to the flower center.







3. Using your fingers squish the bottom of the flower together. Allow 30 seconds to 1 minute for glue to begin to adhere.












4. Add a dollop of glue to your next flower and squish it around the first flower. Continue to glue and squish until you are happy with your flower's fullness. Allow flower to dry (30 minutes) I like 4 flowers of the same size together. I like 6 flowers if you are layering them smallest to largest and using different sizes.

5. The bottom of the flower (where it was squished) will be long and pointy. Use scissors to snip the end so flower will lay flatter.

6. Use flower punch on green cardstock to create leaves.

7. Remove a few petals if needed to scale leaves to match flower size. Score leaves with "vein" lines and crumple leaves up.




8. Ink leaves with VersaMark ink and adhere to flower with tacky glue.







9. Don't be afraid to embellish these beauties with other scrap materials you have laying about. I inserted two pearl sticks and some scraps of tulle in one and swirled a few drops of water in an almost empty bottle of Stickles and sprayed the petals to sparkle up the another.

10. Fluff and reshape petals as needed.









The flowers will turn out differently depending on which shape the flat Prima's start out as.

Save your packaging! I reuse the cello bags for all sorts of things and I will be sharing a mini album I made from the Kraft sheet the flowers were on later.

Thanks for stopping by,

CarrieAnne