Paper Topiary Trees

We had a great day at our Memoranza workshop yesterday. There were 17 scrappers who attended and about 24 people who came in to have a look. All in all the four of us who ran the event were pretty content with the result!

I explained to everyone who would listen about how to make a papercraft project I've featured in this post. It's a paper topiary tree. The design came from the USA Creative Memories vaults. I made one or two small changes - added larger and more butterflies for example. Almost all you need for this project are paper punches and scraps of coordinating paper. Find an old plastic flower pot, cover it in paper of your choice. Add rocks to the bottom. Cover a styrofoam ball with paper shapes punched into circles and flowers and pin them in with pearl headed pins. Cut a circle of cardboard to fill in the space above the rocks in the pot and cover it with matching paper. Poke a paper covered length of wooden dowel into the styrofoam ball and thread it through your cardboard circle, then push the lot into the rocks. Twist some florist wire around a pencil and remove the wire from the pencil so you keep the shaped coils in the wire. Add butterfly shapes (I made most of these with heart punches) to one end of the coiled wire and push the other end of the wire into the edges of the pot or into the tree itself as desired. Add a paper flower or two to the front of the pot (the flower was also made with punches - this time I used star shapes) and Voila!

Let me know if you decide to make one of these :-)