A LITTLE OF THIS, AND A LITTLE OF THAT

(Projects 1 and 2)

Clay tags (everyone else is making them, so we had to see what the fuss 

was all about), and paper flowers using old book pages.  A perfect combination for

making favors for the "book-discussion-dinner-table"!  

(Book group members, if you're looking at this post before our meeting - you 

really shouldn't be here yet!  So . . . we'll pause while you click off the site.)

So, here goes!

Take some hemp string -

a couple paper punches . . .

 add a little glue . . . (hot glue too)

 some paper snippets from an old book . . .

 some clay tags . . .

 some circle punches and letter stickers . . .

put it all together . . . and you end up with this!

 The directions for this flower (called Kusudama) are in the book entitled, Playing With Books.

However, Jan was willing to show you, step by step, how it's done!  She'll fold one petal.  To make a flower, you need to fold 5 petals.  It looks complicated, but once you fold a few, it's a piece of cake!  Thanks Jan!  :)

After you fold all five "petals", you glue them together (glue sticks work, but hot glue works really well).  Then we placed a 20 gauge wire through the center in the back of the flower - where all the sections meet - and wrapped it in more page scraps.  You could use floral tape also.  We cut a 1" disc of plain paper and put a monogram sticker for each person in the center of the flower.

 The "leaves" are made with a paper punch and then trimmed 

into a leaf shape and hot glued onto the stem.

 Last of all we used hot glue to adhere the stem to the bottom of a small jar, and a little dab of glue to the inside of the rim to hold the stem in place.  Then we filled it with shredded pages, and tied a bow around the top.  Jan had brought some vintage seam bindings with her and they worked perfectly.   The clay tags we made just for book group were tied on with hemp twine.

 And now it's all ready for book group to arrive on a hot summer night!  

Just in case you're wondering what we're reading . . . it's a 

great book to read in the summertime about sailing the high seas.  

It's called, We, The Drowned.

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