Accordion Folded Spring Flower Collage

You will need some sturdy paper, poster board, or light weight cardboard for your base. I cut a cereal box into three strips for our project. Accordion fold your strips, so your finished piece will be able to stand.

Time to gather your stem collage items. I gathered these ahead of time and presented my girls with a “stem buffet.” Your kids might enjoy helping you with this step, too.

Stem Material Ideas:

• plastic straws
• pipe cleaners
• strips of colored & patterned paper
• felt
• craft foam
• yarn
• ribbon
• popsicle sticks, painted green
• green tape
• draw stems with green crayons, markers, paint, etc.

 Once you have all your stem materials gathered, glue, tape, and draw stems on your board. Be prepared – pipe cleaners take a lot of glue to stick! Set this aside to dry while you work on your flowers.

There are many different ways to make your flowers – use what you have on hand! We cut circles and tulip shapes out of watercolor paper. The girls made designs with oil pastels and crayons, followed by watercolor painting.
Other ideas for flowers: colored paper shapes, mini cupcake papers, flower pictures cut from magazines and catalogs, or flower stickers.

 When your flowers are finished and dry, attach them to your stems. We used a combination of glue stick and white glue for this part. Glue dots would also work great, with no drying time.

 That’s it! Now you have some cheery flowers to tide you over till the real ones are blooming. My girls also decided these would make great backdrops for their Playmobil and animal set-ups. Fun!