For my third plant pot, I wanted to make some papercraft flowers. There are still projects I haven’t attempted in The Paper Florist by Suzi Mclaughlin but there was one that looked like it would be suited for a smaller scale – the jasmine branch. The project itself featured lots of repetition because you needed to make little individual jasmine flowers, then you would combine to make little sprigs and then finally attach them to create a much bigger branch.

It does take a little bit of time to get started initially. I made templates of the jasmine flower and the two leaf patterns and cut them out of white printer paper and dark green paper respectively. Because of the size of the flower involved, it was actually difficult for me to just sit there cutting out each on individually! I tried to cut out stacks of flowers at a time but this can put more strain on your hand that is doing the cutting. I spaced out my cutting over a couple of days to reduce the strain.

The leaves were already pre-folded in half because I tried cutting them out of a different type of paper initially but it was too thick to fold neatly and it looked terrible. I cut out some extras in case I messed up with the gluing later down the line – the original project called for 50 flowers and leaves but I had no need to make a branch that big for my pot size!

The cutting of all the pieces is the hard part! After that, it is fairly straight-forward. The flowers need a little prep work before everything can be attached though. You need to first roll the petals outwards with a bamboo skewer, and then push the centre of the flower down whilst adding a hole for the wire. This can be accomplished by a ball of Blu Tack and a sewing pin – you just need to push the centre of the flower into the Blu tack with the skewer end and this keeps the petals curled.

The sewing pin trick works if you are using 30g florist wire which is about the same width, but I only had 26g wire which needed a bit more force to go through the pin hole (in wire, the larger the number the smaller the diameter). I like to do all of my hot gluing in one go since I keep my glue gun stored away, so I pierced all the flowers with 10cm lengths of 26g wire and stuck them back into the Blu Tack ball for later. You secure the ends by curling the wire around a thicker 18g piece of wire to create small loops for the hot glue to stick under.

Now I’m not the cleanest hot glue user in the world… You do have to work quick when using hot glue, but some of the jasmine flowers did get a little misaligned when I secured them. The glue dots also need to be as small as possible to hide under the loops but have enough contact to secure the flowers. Good thing I had some spares! You also need to affix the single leaves to their own wire stems too.

I had enough to make two small sprigs that I was happy with. Since I didn’t have a use for two separate sprigs, I decided to make the mini branch that was suggested in the book. I took a larger 18g piece of wire and secured the two sprigs to it with florist tape, one above the other. At this point you need to check if everything is secured properly as a bunch of leaves fell off their stems for me and I have to quickly reglue them carefully.

I couldn’t think of another way to dress up the pot so I used the tried-and-true dry oasis foam and decorative pebbles. The finished plant stands at twice the height compared to my previous two mini plant pots! I guess when I line all of my pots up, I will have to put this one in the corner so it doesn’t block my desk view too much. One sprig might have been better but the jasmine plant does look a lot better when there’s lots of it!

Mini planter pot #4 will hopefully be done by next month – it’ll be similar to something else I’ve already done so I want to add some different components to it.

Materials needed:
– white and dark green paper
– 18g and 26g florist wire
– florist tape
– decorative pebbles
– dry oasis foam

Tools needed:
– hot glue gun
– scissors
– jewellery pliers and wire cutters
– bamboo skewer