Tissue Flower Topiary

Wendy Piersall of shares this great tutorial for creating a flower topiary tree out of tissue paper. The pretty topiary makes for an inexpensive and lasting gift for Mother's Day. Kids will love scrunching up the tissue paper for this craft too!

See this project and more in 27 Topiary Craft Projects.

Materials:

• Green tissue paper- 3 sheets (ideally in three different shades of green)
• Pink tissue paper- 3 sheets (again ideally in three different shades of pink, or whatever three colors you want)
• 3 inch styrofoam ball
• Small cylinder or cube of floral foam to stick into the clay pot (You could also use play dough)- (I cut a triangle of styrofoam from some appliance packaging we had around the house)
• 3 inch (or so) mini clay plant pot
• Plain straight pins
• 4 straight pins with pretty pearlescent ball on top for the main flowers
• 6″-7″ inch stick from your yard

Note- I think the reason this turned out so well was because I was able to use different shades of green and pink tissue paper. Normal tissue paper packages don’t come so nicely shaded for paper flower crafts, but I swear by a huge package of tissue paper I am able to get at Hobby Lobby for $5 (inconveniently they don’t sell online, but CreateforLess has shades of green at $.89 a package).

Instructions:

1. First cut up the green tissue paper into approximately 2 inch squares. They are going to get crumpled up, so don’t worry about being precise or anything.
   
   
    
2. Start scrunching up the squares into loose little balls. I found it worked best if I rolled them between my hands as if it were clay I was trying to roll into a ball. Even on a tiny ball you will need a surprisingly large number of these, because you want them to be relatively close together.
    
3. Next just start pinning them to the styrofoam ball. Don’t put them too close together, because you will want to have room to put in the flowers. You can see in the second photo how close I put them together.
   
       
    
4. Now cut up your pink tissue paper into squares. For the largest flowers I used about 3 inch squares, the medium about two inch squares and the small about one inch squares. Again, this is approximate, because they are just going to get crumpled up again.
   
   
    
5. Add the largest flowers first, because they will be the most prominent and need to be placed somewhat evenly around the ball. I thought I was going to add a lot, but found that four was plenty. If you can find straight pins with the pretty pearl tops, use those to attach the largest flowers. If you have a lot of those, you can also use them for your smaller flowers too. I didn’t, so I just used regular straight pins everywhere else.
   
   
    
6. Then add the smaller flowers in between the green ‘leaves’ where you can still see the styrofoam.
    
7. Next, decide what part of the ball you want to be the top, and stuff the stick from your yard into the bottom. I didn’t take a picture of this part, because it’s pretty dang easy to do. Then shove the cylinder or dough into the flower post, and stuff the stick into the midde so that it is standing straight up.
    
8. Cover the foam base with green tissue like you did the top ball, but this time, don’t let the styrofoam peek through.
   
   
    
9. And ta - da, you are done!