Business is Blooming!

About a week or so ago, I was rather sick and so I was home from work resting. Which actually means I was home from work playing on Pinterest. I found this blog post as I was pinning and I thought two things. 1. It looks more like a zinnia to me, and 2. Instead of a mirror in the center, I could finish them and make them more like a flower and hang them in my office.

Zinnias from my mom's garden.

I have a pretty big office, most importantly, it has high ceilings and to add more interest I have been trying to find something to put along the back wall that I could hang from top to bottom. So this fit the bill and my decorating scheme that I have going. 

This also means that I needed a lot of spoons because I made nine of these. I also used 11" plastic plates as my base, using the plate made the spoons fan nicely as opposed to a piece of cardboard or something flat. I found that I used 62-63 spoons on each 11" plate. Something to keep in mind if you are not making a lot of them. One thing I needed not shown in the picture above was spray paint. Rust-oleum makes a spray paint now that works on plastics!

Before I started, I added a ribbon loop to the front of the plate for hanging. Saved me frustration later.

Tiny score for breaking the spoon apart.

I started by trying to cut the spoon from the handle. Apparently I purchased the most durable spoons ever because I almost died twice trying and got a piece of plastic in my eye. I quickly changed methods and got a serrated knife and made two score marks on the back of the spoon as shown. Just putting a little score on the spoon made them easy to pop apart with my hands. There are other spoons that are probably better to cut with scissors, but mine were not. 

Crap-ton of spoons.

Once I had cut/snapped a ton of spoons I started gluing. I found it was better to put a blob on the spoon as opposed to putting a line of glue on the plate and setting them on the plate.

Then I did the first inner layer...

Another Inner Layer

And voila! The base of the flowers is complete!

I then made the other eight, two of them, I cut the plate down and made smaller versions.

Spray Painted

Then comes the painting. I painted one by hand first without spray painting it. You can do it this way, but I think it doesn't look as nice because its hard to get all of the white of the plate painted that way, so I stopped and went to spray paint them all first.

 After that I proceeded to paint them with additional colors and blending. On each I just did what I liked and made them look more dimensional.

Once I had them all painted I made centers to finish them off. I found some golden colored cardstock, made a tube, fringed it a little, folded the fringe, added some glitter and there you have it, a pretty center! This was something simple that I made up out of the blue, you could do anything to finish it off.

Then I glued them to the centers of each flower and they were ready to hang!

 

They turned out just as I imagined! I may make a few more to really fill up my wall or add stems or something to them, but for now I am very excited about how they turned out!