Tissue Paper Flowers

So, I've been looking for an inexpensive way to decorate favors. Of course, I love flowers. I adore the idea of placing a fresh flower on each guests' table setting, on programs and on favor bags, just to name a few.

But let's face it, flowers are costly. It's enough just to pay for the bouquets and table arrangements, let alone all the small extras. I went to the craft store today looking for an alterative and nothing would really do. The silk flowers were expensive and honestly, weren't even that impressive. Martha Stewart's line of 6 dimensional flower apliques were cute, but way too expensive. Then I came across something else-- something inexpensive and adorable: the tissue paper flower!

What's awesome about this is that you can do with them whatever you want-- you pick the color, and the type of flower you're going for. And as we all know, tissue paper is a fraction of the cost of real flowers.

The flowers above were made from a kit: yes, Martha Stewart has done it again. The kits are sold at Michael's for $20 a pop and yeild a nice size bouqet for a table arrangement. But of course, you can do them yourself for much cheaper by buying the tools yourself. Hey, you may even want to use MS's kit as a cheat sheet ;-) To try it yourself, check one step by step here. And you can buy additional kits (and get more ideas) at the Paper Source.

Also, if you're not into the whole DIY thing, you can actually hire someone to do these for you. Who knew? Apparently paper flowers are a growing trend among brides who just don't want to shell out the cash for the real thing. Maria Noble of St. Jude Creations in Bristol, Connecticuit does some AMAZING stuff with paper. She charges from .50/flower to $20.99/dozen depending on the flower of choice and gives discounts for orders above $100.

Here, a few examples of St. Jude Creation paper flowers:

She also does clay flowers. On her site, I came across her extremely life-like gardenias. This is the flower I'm DYING to have in my bouquet (and the men's lapels), but I've been rebuked by every florist I spoke to: they're very fragile spring flowers and apparently will wilt the minute I take them outside on my late-August wedding day.

Uh oh... enter a new idea (or as Oprah would say, my "Aha" moment): mixing the clay gardenia in with the fresh flowers! For one thing, they definitely won't wilt. And if they look half as good in person as they do online, you won't be able to tell the gardenia mixed in amongst all the other flowers aren't real-- that is unless you're REALLY all up in my bouquet mix.

Above, St. Jude Creation's clay gardenias.

Also, Check out some other paper flower ideas. Believe it or not, these (below) are tissue paper!

(From Vintage Glam)