In the UK at the start of spring or around late February, you will start to see daffodils (or narcissus) popping up and bloom in large groups until May. They come back every year and spread quite easily, so they really are absolutely everywhere! But you will only see them for about two months, so why not create a bunch that will last forever?

There are a lot of ways to create a daffodil from paper (you could use papercraft or kusudama units), but I am following the method in the book Origami Flowers by Hiromi Hayashi. This book shows you how to do a six-petal daffodil.

To make the daffodils, you will need some yellow paper in various shades, some thick florist’s wires and some florist tape in green and yellow. You will also need a cutting tool – I use a craft knife and cutting mat, but scissors will also work.

There are two types of narcissus in this book, though I don’t think I’ve ever seen a pink daffodil before! So I went with version one.

I tend to find that daffodils come in two types of colours; either a fully plain yellow, or a yellow petal base with a darker yellow (or even orange) centre. So I will be creating a few different colour schemes.

To start with, I created hexagon shapes from a 15cm square of yellow paper. To make the daffodils with different-coloured centres, another hexagon shape from a 7.5cm square of paper needs to be made. I made the second hexagon slightly bigger from 9cm squares instead to ensure they would fit.

You have to be quite confident with reverse folding in order to collapse the model. To colour the centre, you can glue the smaller hexagon to the back of the collapsed model – it will make folding a bit more difficult as there are more layers but the result is quite nice.

At this point it doesn’t really look like a daffodil, but then the petals get pulled out and it all falls into place! The centre part is cut away and folded back to show the inner part. It was tough doing this, I think my craft knife was not sharp enough and the edges would tear, so I had to clean it up afterwards.

I made three different daffodils; plain yellow, light yellow with a yellow centre, and yellow with an orange centre. You wouldn’t normally see these colours together in the wild and each bunch is usually homogenous!

To make the stem, you need a thick florist’s wire. I wrapped it with green florist tape to make it wider, then I wrapped the end with yellow florist tape to make the stamen. Yellow florist tape is not so easily found in craft stores, I ended up having to buy this online.

The finished wire can just be easily insert through the daffodil centre. If you wrap the yellow part thick enough, it should just stay in the flower, otherwise you might need a little glue to keep things in place. I chose to not use glue, so I could reposition the flowers at the end, but they do fall out quite a lot!

I found that these daffodils would not be arranged in a vase very well, so I needed to use some oasis foam to hold them down. It doesn’t look great but we have ways to hide this!

I put together some leaves by cutting out long shapes in dark green paper and sandwiching them together with a thin florist’s wire and wood glue. To cover the oasis foam, I had some coloured glass pebbles usually used for vase filler.

I thought I was done, but after looking at it for a day, I thought that three daffodils by themselves looked a little sad! So I made three more assorted daffodils for a total of six and cut more green leaves to fill the vase. Be careful when working with oasis foam though, the foam dust really got all over my desk!
The nice yellow really brings a spring feeling to my windowsill!

Materials used:
– plain yellow paper in various shades
– dark green paper
– florist tape green/yellow
– florist wires
– oasis foam
– glass pebbles
– vase

Tools used:
– craft knife and cutting mat
– wire cutters
– wood glue