Reading Helps Your Mind Grow
This floral library display is currently brightening up a corner of the school library. The inspiration for this display came from Margaret Puszka via ProTeacher.net. I made a few changes to the wording and decided to make my paper flowers 3D. Both the staff and students love this display. I have had lots of comments about how wonderful it looks and how colourful it is. It was lots of fun to make and wasn’t all that hard or time consuming.
Resources
The font I used for this display is called FLOWER by CloutierFontes. It really is gorgeous and more amazing the closer you look at it. I just downloaded it and printed each letter on green cardboard. There are plenty of flowery fonts available for free via font sites.
2D AND 3D PAPER FLOWERS
Some of the flowers I created were simple cutouts, while others were clever 3D constructions. There is an amazing array of paper flower tutorials on the net. Some I made up as I went along, while others came from a particular source of inspiration. For example the red curly roses came from Dozi Designs. 
I experimented with a range of rolled paper flowers and this tutorial provided the best results.
– Click on the flower images for the tutorials.
The clear favourite flower of the students was the swirly purple hyacinths. These were inspired by wonderfuldiy. It took me a while to get a tight enough curl, but once I did – using a bamboo skewer to start each roll – they were quite easy to make. We are going to try running this as a lunch-time craft activity, and I’ve already got quite a list of names of students who want these flowers when they are removed from the window.
The last flower I made using a tutorial design was the pink cherry blossom. This came from duitang. Quite frankly I’m rather terrible at origami but I was able to manage this, although I only got to step 9 instead of the full 16. I’m not sure what the fully completed cherry blossom looks like but the product at step 9 looked good enough for me. Once I got the hang of it they were really fun to make.
The rest of the paper flowers were simply a matter of playing with colours and shapes, rolling up frayed edges or making folds. The grass at the bottom was just green triangles of card I had leftover from another display, as were the leaves and stems.
This is a display I could constantly add to or change. The next step will be adding a few birds, bees or bugs. I would love to try this floral arrangement against a dark background instead of on a window.