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Augment Your Craft Flowers
To get the fullest looking ribbon flower, cloth flower, or plastic flower
bouquet, you want to have the fullest flowers. Depending upon the flowers you
use, you might wish to perk them up a bit.
You can put together an artificial flower bouquet purely from purchased
plastic flowers or cloth flowers. I find that some crafted flowers can usually
be crafted that out shine any inexpensive commercial ones. So I like to make a
crafted flower the main component of the bouquet.
I like shredded ribbon flowers the most, like the one in the picture.
They are easy to make by using polypropylene ribbon and a ribbon shredder.
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I like to dress up the ribbon flowers with extra leaves. The leaves that
work easiest are ones with a hole in the center for the floral-wire flower
stem.
The plastic leaves I used in this tutorial were obtained by removing them
from some inexpensive plastic flowers. I used the remainder of the flowers for
additional filler in the floral bouquet.
Leaves for the purpose are available at some craft stores that carry
floral crafting supplies.
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Use this handy craft-customized search engine to find your crafting
materials:
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Once you've made the flowers, slide a plastic leaf flush to the floral tape
at the bloom, and fasten in place with floral tape at the base of the leaf.
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Flower with Added Leaf
As you can see, the shredded ribbon flower is improved by the addition of
the plastic leaf. To get the crafted flower up to the level it needs to be for
a flower bouquet, I usually add one or more leaves.
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Adding a Second Leaf
To add a second plastic leaf to the crafted flower, wrap several turns of
floral tape around the stem wire at the desired height of the leaf. Put enough
tape so that the leaf can't slide over the tape.
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A Complete Augmented Flower
When the second crafted flower is in position, wrap floral tape around the
base as with the first plastic leaf to secure it.
At the left is pictured a crafted flower with a couple of added leaves.
Don't you think the artificial flower has much more body with the extra
leaves?
If your floral craft needs more enhancement, you can try the leaf idea.
Whether you need to enhance your flowers or not, you'll need about 15 of them
to make a full bouquet.
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