Crepe Paper Poppies

For me, Memorial Day means BBQ’s and warm weather and sleeping in.  It also means long car trips through the dessert to the Veterans Memorial Cemetery with my whole family to put flowers and flags on Grandpa’s grave. It means dressing in red, white, and blue and buying crepe paper poppies from the sweet, old man outside the grocery store. It means remembering with gratitude and awe the brave men and women who have lost their lives serving in the United States Armed Forces.

If you’d like to make your own crepe paper poppies this weekend, they are quick and sweet, and you might already have everything you need on hand.  Here’s how:

Materials & Tools:
4″ thin floral wire
small shank-back button (the kind with the little plastic loop on the back)
red crepe paper streamers, about 12″
tape
ribbon
hot glue gun and glue sticks

small bar pin

scissors

wire snips

1.  Bend your wire in half, slide the button onto the wire (stopping at the bend in the middle), and twist the wire to hold the button firmly in place.

2.  Lay the button at one end of the streamer about 1/2″ from the bottom edge, and begin wrapping the streamer around the wire and itself, pleating as you go.

3.  When your flower looks like you want it to, trim off any extra streamer. Wrap the “stem” of the flower  tightly with tape, and use your wire snips to trim off any extra wire that sticks out past the crepe paper stem.

4.  Wrap the “stem” of the flower tightly with ribbon. Use hot glue to attach the ribbon to the crepe paper stem. Make sure all of the tape is covered. Trim off the excess ribbon and use hot glue to secure the loose end of the ribbon in the back.

5.  Hot glue a small bar pin to the back of your ribbon.