Paper Hydrangeas to Last A Lifetime

I will be completely honest with you here. . . I was dreading making paper hydrangeas and have put off designing the burst of tiny blooms for a very long time. Though it is one of my favorite flowers, the idea of gluing hundreds of little petals into a ball seemed daunting. One of my friends, who is also my unofficial blog coach, challenged me to design the hydrangea as it is wedding season and this is a wedding flower favorite! I am not one to miss a good challenge so I took her on. My process of designing a flower starts with what I call “noodling it over in my head”. I think through the details of the real flower and how I might build the structure, or how would this paper need to curl to replicate this petal . . . So in noodling the hydrangea, I came up with the idea of this floral wire structure of 30 strands each to make the bloom. After you have this ready, the rest is easy! If you don’t have a cutting machine, yes, cutting 60-90 little flowers for each hydrangea head is pretty time consuming, but worth it. The thing I love about hydrangeas, real or paper, is that each lush head takes a lot of space, both physically and visually. So just a few of these intricate flowers make a real statement.

For my blooms I used a metallic paper from paper-papers.com. Ice Silver on which I painted the pale green centers and Opal to give a pale yellow background to the blue wash, were my color choices. For the leaves I chose the dark green of Basis Green or Moss if you want more metallic look. . On the smaller blooms I used 60 petals, which is two sheets of paper and for the larger I glued on 90 petals, which were cut from three sheets of paper. Each flower has three leaves glued under the base of the dome. You can add more leaves on separate stems of wire if you would like extra greenery in your bouquet. For the stems I used a 12 inch floral wire that is 18 gage though 20 or 22 are fine to use too. You can find these wires in your craft store floral section. You will need 30 stems of wire for both sizes of bloom. To add some color to the paper petals, I used a simple craft paint that was quite watered down to give just a touch of color. The results are just gorgeous, don’t you think?

Below is my full tutorial on how to make these paper hydrangeas. A huge thanks to paper-papers.com for hosting this free printable pattern. At the end of this post is a link for you to go there and download the printable patterns are well as the SVG files for your Cricut Explore or Cameo Silhouette. If you are making a lot of these flowers, I do recommend you buy a Cricut Explore and am happy to answer any questions about cutting machines. I do have both brands. Enjoy! ~ Lia