To make the flowers on the Always and Forever Page

To make the flowers on the Always and Forever Page. (This is adapted from the blog Such a Pretty Mess by Gabrielle Pollacco)

1. The first thing you need to do, is design your page or at least pick out the papers/color scheme for the page you are making. This will help, let me explain. Unless you want to make these flowers just for fun, which I have done, because they are just simply fun to make, then you aren't gonna wanna spend time making flowers that aren't going to match your page in the end. It's alot of work to make a ton of flowers, then find out they don't match anything. My advice is to practice making these with white paper, that way you can use them on anything. You can add ink, chalk or paint to change them. White flowers are very easy to adapt to anything. And these flowers are so easy, you won't really need to make more then one as a practice flower.

2. You are either gonna need a die cutting machine, three flower punches (one - 2 inch, one 1 1/2 inch and 1 one inch) or you can simply tear the paper into circles. You will also need glue dots or a fast drying, super sticky glue and a small sprayer with water or a sprayer of glitter mist. (My advice on this is to buy something that is very light, so that it doesn't overpower the color of the flower.)

3. Cut 3 two inch flowers, 3 one and a half inch flowers and 1 one inch flower.

4. Spray each piece, front and back with either the water or glitter mist. Do not drench the pieces, just lightly spray them.

5. Ball them all up into crumpled pieces of paper and very gently open them up to dry.Now here is where the character is built, for each flower. the less you smooth out the pieces, the better they look,but be aware that you don't want each piece to still be too crumpled. (Leave the one inch flower balled up.)

6. Let them all dry. Sometimes I do these after I picked my papers, before I built the layout and I let them dry while my page comes together.

7. Once they are dry, starting on the bottom, take the 3 two inch flowers and layer them, gluing them in between each layer. I turn the flowers just a little each time a glue one down to give it a more full look.

8. Do the same for the 3 one and a half inch flowers, gluing them to the layered two inch flowers.

9. Take that last flower, the one inch, and add glue to it, stick it in the middle, now let dry (unless of course you used glue dots.)

After all the steps above are done, you can add pretty centers.