Book Page Bouquet Part One: Paper Rose DIY

Whenever I share pictures from my wedding, I always get emails asking about my bridesmaid's bouquets. 

I love books and wanted to incorporate them into as many ways as possible in the wedding, and these were a great way to do that. Plus, it saved roughly $1,100 on flowers. Winning. 

My mom and I made them-we watched a bunch of different paper flower tutorials and kind of combined them all together to make these. I think they turned out so great, and I love that so many of my bridesmaids still have their bouquets.

If you want to make your own (you do, because paper roses made from your favorite book are just adorable), here's how to do it!

You will need: 

-a book

-scissors

-a hot glue gun

Optional for a bouquet: 

-floral stems

-ribbon

 First, rip some pages out of a book. Yes, it will hurt your book-lover's heart. But it's okay. You can do it.

 Take the top right corner of the page and fold it over to meet the other side of the page, like this:

Cut off the page below the fold, leaving a triangle. 

 Fold the triangle over on itself, making a smaller triangle....

...and then again one more time, so you end up with this: 

 Holding the triangle point down, cut the top into a rounded shape, like an ice-cream cone.

Or like a petal, I guess. But ice cream cone just sounds more fun.

 Unfold your ice cream cone, and you have your flower! Now, in order to make these look like a rose, you need to curl the edges of the petals with something. I used a crochet hook here, but I've also used a pen and a wooden skewer. Whatever you have laying around will work, just curl the petals under, like this:

 When you're done, your flower should look something similar to this. Make three of these flower pieces. 

What you're going to do now is cut some smaller petals. Cut one petal from one flower, two from the next flower, and three from the next flower. Like this: 

 You should now have six pieces, like these:

Using a glue gun, glue the flowers "back together" so that there is no gap in them.

When you get to the single petal, just roll in up in a loose tube. Your six pieces should now look like this:

Now onto the fun part: making the rose!

The flower with the most petals is your base. If you're going to be making a bouquet, take the stem and poke it through the base flower. If you're just making roses without stems, skip this step.

 Secure it with a bit of hot glue. It doesn't have to be perfectly centered, as you can bend the stem whichever way you need it to go later.

Next, take the second-biggest flower (the one you cut two petals from) and cut a little bit off of the bottom so it fits nicely into the base flower. 

Using hot glue, lay this flower over the base flower.

 Try to line the flowers up in such a way that one flower's petals covers the flower's below its gaps.

Continue doing this with all of the pieces, in order from biggest to smallest. The smaller the piece, the more you might need to cut off from the bottom of the flower to make it fit the way you want it to.

 The final step is putting the single petal you rolled up right in the middle! If you have a stem in the flower, use this piece to cover it up.

 And that's it! These are so fun and easy to make, and can be used for so many cute things. If you have any questions or get stuck on any of the steps, just ask and I'll answer in the comments! This is one of those DIYs where it seems a bit tricky at first, but once you make one, you'll get the hang of it be able to knock tons of them out in no time.

I'll be back next week to show you how to make a bouquet out of these!