A quick pleated flower tutorial

I'm working on the current challenge - Vera's card drive - and I thought I'd share with you some what I am using on them. For the first ones, I am not using an image, only pleated flowers. The first time I saw them was when Christine from the Arc Angels Craft Club showed us how to make Christmas decorations a couple of years ago.

Later, Emily Pitts had a great tutorial in the Studio Calico blog. Here's my twist:

1. What you will need:

   * border punch - mine is MS flower bed.
   * 1 strip of paper, about 1.5 inches wide and 12 inches long (plain or patterned, with light coloured background)
   * 3 or 4 markers - dark, medium and light of same colour

2. Colour the paper strip

Using the thick end of the marker, colour stripes in one border, going from darker to lighter stripes. You could, at the end, go over all the coloured part with the lightest colour to blend them in, but honestly there's no need, it will look OK at the end.

3.Punch the paper strip

My favourite part.  I have here two paper strips,  I punched the coloured side in top one, and the opposite side on the bottom one. Don't they look pretty already?

4. Pleat the paper.

If you have a scoring tool, that's the time to use it. I don't, so I just folded by hand, very thin pleats, about 0.5 cm wide  1/4").
Then glue one end to the other.

5. Stick to the paper.

Put a few circles of glue on the paper you want to stick your flower too. Gently pull the punched side open, making a circle, place it over the glue. Hold  the flower for a while, until the glue sets.


I didn't have the card ready yet, so I glued the flower to a bit of scrap paper, as you can see below.

6. Done!

I used some for a scrapbook page and the remaning for cards.
I'll show you the final cards on Thursday.