Garden Center How To - Flowers

Welcome to the tutorial on How To Make Pop-Up Flowers (and their distant cousins, the Bendy-Straw Flowers That Don't Do Anything). See the full Garden Center here.

You can find variations of these flower crafts all over the internet. The main draw (ooh, pun!) of this activity is the coloring. Children of any age can do this bit. And because the flowers are cut out along their outlines, even messy coloring-outside-the-lines will work. While the kids are contentedly coloring, you can assemble the other parts.

First, draw flowers on cardstock. You can use paper, but cardstock holds up better.

For the Bendy-Straw Flowers That Don't Do Anything, just glue the finished flowers onto the ends of the straws. We slit the straw tips and slotted the flowers in before gluing them.

 

You might even want to make some of these in double-layer, so you can sandwich the stems between them. Here we left a bridge of card/paper connecting both sides of the flower, just to help with alignment when we pair them up later.

To make the pop-up flowers, you'll need

• A paper or plastic cup
• A circle of fabric for the dirt - the diameter is roughly twice that of the cup's mouth
• A straw or dowel or stick
• Some leaf shapes - we used fabric
• A double-layer flower

First, make a hole in the bottom of the cup large enough for the straw to pass through unhindered.

Then poke (do not cut) the tiniest hole you can in the center of the fabric circle and insert the straw. 

Glue the fabric around the straw. Exactly where on the straw to position the fabric depends on how long your straw is with respect to the depth of your cup. You might want to experiment a bit, but we found that about half-way down is suitable. Glue on the leaves.

Apply glue on the wrong side of the flower shapes and sandwich the tip of the straw between them. 

Then apply a ring of glue along the inside of the cup. Again the position of the glue ring depends on the depth of the cup with respect to the length of your straw, so be prepared to experiment. Ours was about half-way down.

Insert the straw into the hole in the cup case, and stick the edge of the fabric circle to the ring of glue. Some of the circumference will remain unattached but that's OK. 

You should be able to squish the flower right down by lowering the straw

 and pop the flower right up by raising the straw.

Here's that old project (again) that offers an alternative to pot planting - a foam dirt bed.

Next up: the watering cans!