An Easy 5 petal flower to make!

I have a really easy flower to show your today.  I was experimenting with my punches and came up with this cute flower that you can put together in minutes. 

You will need card stock, a spray water bottle, Glimmer Mist (optional), Stickles (optional) and Distress ink (optional.)

To make this flower you will need a 5 petal flower punch and a snowflake punch.  Here are the ones I used.

My flower punch is 1 5/8 inches across.  The snowflake punch is an EK Success punch I have had quite a while.  I decided it could double as the stamens in my flower. You will need to punch two flowers and one snowflake in a coordinating color. 

I started with light pink cardstock for the flowers and yellow cardstock to punch the snowflake.  First I set my flowers out on a craft sheet and sprayed them with Black Cherry Glimmer Mist.   At this point you can use just plain water and if you are working with pretty paper and you don't want to alter the color.

I am always trying to make the most of my scrapbook time, so I tend to look for ways to make things go faster.  With my flowers I pick them up with tweezers and use a blow dryer to speed along my drying time.  I want my flowers to be just a tiny bit damp.  That will make them easy to shape, so don't dry them all the way yet.  When you can handle the petals easily, curl each petal over a round pencil, paintbrush or other tool.

When you have a nice curl to all petals, then use your blow dryer to finish the drying process.  The flowers will hold their shape well when completely dry.

Here is an optional step.  When I am working with a solid color sometimes I like to distress the edges of my petals to give them more definition.  The flowers are pretty stiff when dry, so I use a cosmetic applicator to apply the distress ink.

Now that your petals are curled and distressed we need to do just a little more shaping so they will lay nicely.  Pick up each flower and bend each petal at the base toward you (the opposite direction of the curl).

I just hold the flower with my thumb at the base of the petal and bend the petal upward.  Now that we have adjusted the petals we can stack and glue our two flowers together . 

After the glue dries I try to work a little bit with the petals to make the flower look as realistic as I can.  I tend to like my top petals curled a little bit more than the bottom petals.  Now we can add our stamens.

At this point you can make some additions to your stamens.  I like to add Stickles to the tips or distress the tips to produce a color change.  Here I used yellow Stickles.

Curl the stamens up leaving the center flat so we can easily glue it to the flower.

After the glue dries, slightly bend the tips of your stamens back to expose better the ends.   Add a pretty center such as a pearl or brad and your flower is complete.

I did some experimenting and made a few examples to give you some inspiration.  Don't hesitate to stamp your cardstock with solvent based ink for a nice pattern or pull out those gel sparkle pens to add some shine to the stamens.   Have fun!