Paper Flower Necklace

My friend Bonney sent me a beautiful and very unique necklace not too long ago (don’t you love surprise packages!?). I was so impressed, I even asked her to tell me the name of the artist – it wound up that she did it herself…she’s super-talented, but I figured that she had found it in a boutique somewhere! Bonney said that she found the tutorial on a really smart site called Folding Trees. Not only does the site have a tutorial to make the necklace that she did, but it had all kinds of other really creative paper crafts, some of which I can’t *wait* to try.

I did change up the craft just a bit by using, like Bonney did with my necklace, a box…so since we are starting Passover tonight, I used a Manishewitz box and a flower-shaped paper punch.  

Through trial and error on this thicker carton paper, I found out that a punch with an all over pattern, like this flower shape, cuts easier for whatever reason than a circle shape.  The kind of punch where you press straight down, like this one, works worlds better than the kind of punch that you press using a handle too.

From that carton, about 36 of the flower shapes were punched out.  Next, they were just folded in half:

Used Mod-Podge to glue a total of six flower shapes together (the glue dries super-quick so by the time you glue two flowers together of all the ones you punched, you can glue on another.

Since my paper was stiffer, I was able to use fewer to make my paper beads.  Once they’re all glued together, there should be a hole in the middle where the necklace string will go through:

Here are the paper beads:

I used some wooden beads as spacers between the paper:

All done!  I’m giving this one to Av’s mom for Passover.  

There’s also a Folding Trees Flickr Group where people upload their pics of inspired paper crafts from the website.  I could go through that website all day – and when I was looking at some older posts, I noticed that they featured a tutorial on wine glass charms like the ones I made a couple of weeks ago!  Theirs are similar but a little different and *so* pretty.  Nice!