DIY Project For My Graduation Party! - The Book Roses

I haven't ever liked fresh cut flowers. Somehow I always manage kill them, although they should be easy to keep alive. Maybe they just don't like me.

My graduation day is approaching fast and it's almost a must to have flowers on the buffet table. I had to figure out a way around this etiquette rule.

Then in the middle of the night my friend tells me that she has seen some awesome roses made out of book pages. After an intense Pinterest session and brainstorming, we decided to use Melinda's instructions.

Thus began a night of cursing, cutting, and figuring out how to make them look like a flowers, not just a mangled pile of paper.

We didn't measure the squares. Just ripping a page out of a book and then folding it half from the top and cutting the extra slip from the bottom off.

We had a first version of the rose, but something was wrong. There weren't any pretty petals, they were all straight and pointy. At this moment we realised, that we were meant to curl the outer edges of the petals. Between the fingers was a bit hard and slow. So taking a narrow knitting needle and rolling around it made the whole process a lot quicker.

The same knitting needle technique we used when rolling the stems for the roses.

Now to the gluing part. It amazed both of how much glue actually goes into one rose.

Parts ten through 15 show the layers of the rose. You're supposed to glue only the edges of the petals together in ten, eleven, and twelve. With thirteen through fifteen you're supposed to glue two petals on top of each other.

The rest is easy. You build the rose from inside out. We glued the first layer (16) of every rose first and then let them dry. It made the rest easier since the base is already dry and unmoving, giving a sort of a stopper for all the other layers.

My best advice is to use a lot of glue. And rather let the layers dry in between than using a little less to get them ready faster.

We skipped the last phase altogether, since we wanted the text to show.

Making these was fun at first. But let me warn you, it's not fun after you are on the tenth hour. Your fingers are probably cramping and glued together. In the end, though, it's all worth it. They are so pretty.

The book had about three hundred pages. Every rose takes three pages, so from one book you get hundred roses. We didn't use textless empty pages, since we wanted the text to show. So altogether we got about seventy roses.


The book I used was a paperback version of Kelly Link's Pretty Monsters. The spine was glued, which helped a lot when ripping the pages out.