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Friday, April 13, 2012

Upcycling Soda Can Flowers

These tiny flowers are so easy to make. My arrangement is in a tiny bottle.

You will need:
A flower punch- I recommend EK Success Paper Shapers Retro Flower Medium Punch
1/16th inch hole punch
Empty and rinsed soda cans
Wire- The wire that I used is also upcycled. It's part of a big bunch of telephone wire that I bought at a garage sale for 50¢- it's a tangled mess of lots of colors. If you don't have telephone wire handy, regular crafting wire, about 18-20 gauge will work.
Round nose pliers

Please exercise caution. This project is not appropriate for children because of the sharp edges of the cans.

Start by cutting open your can. The best way that I've found to do that is to use the tip of household scissors (not good scissors) to poke a hole just under the sloped top of the can. Cut off the top, repeat on the bottom, then cut down the length of the tube carefully. Flatten out the sheet.

Punch flowers from the can. You can get a lot of flowers from one can! Then use the hole punch to punch a small circle from the center of them. Just as they are now they would make fun sequins for decorating things like lamps.

Use the round nose pliers to curve or fold the flowers for a bit of dimension.

Cut 4 inch sections of the wire, and make a small leaf in the wire by making a loop and twisting it. Add a small loop with the round nose pliers a 1/4 inch from the top of the wire. Thread on the flower, and use the round nose pliers to make a spiral with the top of the wire to hold it in place.


Repeat until you have as many flowers as you'd like for your miniature arrangement. Trim them at different lengths to arrange them. For the wire around the neck of the bottle, I wrapped it a few times, twisted, then spiraled the ends around a knitting needle. I'll probably add more spirals to the arrangement to fill it out a bit.

handmade projects

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