Can you make flowers from plastic bags and tulips from sock? Yes, it is possible!
Preethi Venugopal – a civil engineer from Bangalore, India inspires us with that creativity in her to make flowers from plastic bags, even tulips from nylon sock.
Preethi is currently on a sabbatical. She was interested in crafts right from her school days. The best thing about her is she also teach crochet, crafts and arts to kids in her neighborhood for free.
She is an active on blogger (http://tulipsandme.blogspot.in) Her talents expands beyond making crafts. She also makes pencil and charcoal portraits on demand, paints when she finds the mood for it.
She is proficient in acrylics, watercolor and oil paints, likes digital painting as well and often experiment with Adobe Photoshop.
We are happy to share a few of her tutorials here on Propel Steps,
Steps to make flowers using plastic bags:
Step (1): Cut in the indicated areas to get a rectangular sheet.
Step (2): Cut the rectangular sheet into strips of equal width. Depending upon the width of the cover you can make different sizes of flowers. Make a minimum of 6 similar strips and stack them together
Step (3): Make pleats on them (stacked together) of half inch wide throughout
Step (4): Now tie a thread/ plastic strip/ in the middle. If you want the flower to have a stem tie with metal wire instead of plastic strip.
Step (5): Now cut petal shape on both sides
Step (6): This is how it will look
Step (7): Now start pulling up the individual layers on both sides of the tie
Step (8): This is how it looks after pulling out one side completely. Continue pulling out the layers on both sides of the tie.
Step (9): Two flowers that I made in similar fashion
Step (10): Now add it to a bouquet or make one out of a similar bunch of flowers
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Steps to make Tulips from nylon sock:
It is pretty easy once you get the idea of how to make a single petal.
For making this, the materials we need are:
- Nylon sock : Cream and Green color (as you prefer)
- Two empty bottles of slightly different diameter : ( I took 5 cm and 6cm dia bottles respectively to loop the wire around to create petals and leaves)
- Cutting Plier
- Scissors
- Nylon Thread
- Metal Wire : Gold Colour
- Flower tape: Green
- Anther
All these materials will be available in craft shops.
First wind the gold wire on the bottles to form loops and tie them tight using a cutting player. Make 3 smaller petals using 5 cm dia bottle and three larger petals by looping around the 6 cm dia bottle. For the 2 green leaves loop around the two bottles kept side by side together so that you get a larger loop.
Add a central connecting wire : For the 3 bigger petals and the 2 leaves,give a central connecting wire as shown in the above picture using the cutting player. This central wire is important to give the shape to the Tulip.
Wrap the sock around wire petal: Now wrap around the 6 petals with cream nylon sock and the 2 leaf petals with green sock and tie them up using the nylon thread.
Anthers fixed to the stem: Now twist three 15 cm long wires and tie them together. Wind the green flower tape to create a stem. Now tie the Anthers onto the stem with nylon thread.
Tie the petals upside down : Now tie the 3 larger petals upside down followed by the 3 smaller petals.
It will look like this after tying like this.
Petals tied upside down : Now slowly pull them up one by one bringing the shape of the Tulip like this.
Pull the petals up: Tie the leaves in a similar manner on the stem at different positions and gently shape the petals and leaves like this.
Add the leaves : Now wind the flower tape around the leaves to hide the thread.
You are done!!!
Make many to make a bouquet or give it pride of place on your dining table as a single flower arrangement…!!!
Recycling is not the only solution to reduce the adverse effect of the plastic bags, sometimes an artistic mind with little effort can help us to lengthen the usage / reuse the plastic bags. Rather ending up on garbage we can prolong their utility by making flower / crafts out of them. May be someday our technologies will find an efficient way to dispose them safely compared to now, till that we can make it decorate our home, instead of making landfills.
Please visit her blog Tulips and Me for more of her works and wonderful pencil portraits.
A sample of her work. Hindu God : Baby Krishna
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Courtesy : Preethi Venugopal , Tulips and Me and Indiblogger
