Spring’s brighter days and blossoms are here! We join in the celebration of renewal and rebirth with colourful flower crafts using both recycled materials and natural elements.
Each and every occasion is an opportunity for us to create something floral, from the Spring Equinox and Mother’s Day to the world days of Earth, Collage and Bees, that all happen in Spring. Not to mention that May is the month of flowers!
1. Egg carton bouquet
We love using recyclables and giving them a second life full of colours!
For this craft, also the frame is recycled: it was a vintage one, revamped by me a long time ago and waiting for something special to adorn… Its time has arrived!
This creation is the result of a pleasant collaboration with my daughter, in cutting, painting and gluing the various parts (using the glue gun is always her favourite step! 😊)
Tools and materials
For this craft we upcycled a 12-egg carton, a small fruit tray, a plastic bottle and a scrap of cardboard to make a multicoloured bouquet of flowers.
You will need scissors, glue gun, paints and paint brushes, acrylic paint markers.
How to
Cutting the parts
Prepare the background, cutting the carboard in the size of the frame you have, about an A4 size.
Cut the pointed parts of the moulded side of the egg carton and set aside to make daffodil centres and bluebell-like flowers. Cut all the domes and make incisions to create the petals. Each rounded, swollen part becomes a flower centre. With the leftovers make the leaves.
Use the lid to make the flower stems, cutting stripes along the long side.
Cut horizzontally a plastic bottle and keep the bottom half, cut it vertically in half. You will need only one half.
Painting and decorating the parts
Use your vibrant acrylic or tempera paint to decorate the flowers. As our egg carton was in a lovely shade of green, we left it in its original colour. Decorate the vase with acrylic pens.
Assembling the parts
Start gluing the stems, arrange and then glue the flowers in a nice composition, attach the leaves. Lastly, glue the vase on to the cardboard.
We like the outcome so much! At the end, my little girl said it was a gift for me for the “Festa della Mamma”, on Sunday the 8th of May. Actually, it was the second present… got the first one on the 27th March on occasion of Mother’s Day in the UK… I am a very lucky mum!!! 😊
2. Cardboard tube flower wreath
Global Recycling Day, celebrated on March the 18th every year, just a few days before the official entry of Spring, is a recycling initiative that encourages us to look at our trash in a new light. For this occasion, we upcycled some material accumulated in the winter months – cardboard tubes – to create a flower wreath. Some TP roll ornament tutorials seen last Christmas turned out useful!
Tools and materials
24 cardboard tubes (TP rolls), paint and paintbrushes, scissors, glue gun.
How to
A bit of process art for my daughter in painting the rolls: 20 in pastel tones, 4 in green.
Cut each tube in 6 rings; glue them in the corners to make a flower (x20).
Arrange 10 flowers into a wreath and glue them (x2). Glue the two wreaths.
Cut the green tubes in 6 rings each and glue them as leaves.
… Hung the wreath wherever you like! We love so much how it turned out!
3. Flower magazine collage
Always with the focus and ethos of recycling what we have at home, we created this collage inspired by the vibrant floral creations of the artist Laura Blythman. We used clippings from magazines and paper gift bags. We added some little bees to our composition, gleefully buzzing off the sheet of paper, to celebrate World Bee Day, on the 20th May. And a perfect activity for World Collage Day on the 14th May!
Thin metal wires and mini craft adhesive pads did the trick!
We played and had fun in moving flowers, leaves and bees until the final, agreed position. Fine-motor skills are involved and stimulated by cutting out the small parts and attaching the sticky pads; creativity and imagination by creating the composition.
We love the outcome! It needs to be framed… I have a few ideas about DiY frames, maybe a new craft???
4. Torn paper flowers
How to turn a mum’s passion for torn paper collage into an easy art&craft activity for kids: a field of multicoloured flowers from recycled paper, such as old magazines and catalogues. Very easy to do by little hands!
5. Pear carton flowers
Another colourful way to upcycle your trash is to turn pear moulded trays into multicoloured, chubby flowers. I described how to make them in the post: Spring crafts – Pear carton flowers!
6. Giant chalk flowers
Like every year, in our garden giant flowers drawn on the fence with giant chalks can’t be missing, waiting for the real ones to grow…
Here are our annual versions (2018, 2020, 2022), not very different actually, but always a great fun to create them!
7. Earth daisy threading
Joining in the celebration of Earth Day, 22nd April, we created our own Earth map filled with daisies from our garden.
After sketching the continents on a scrap of cardboard, I invited my girl to make holes with a skewer and to thread the flowers on to them. She was enthusiastic and started cheerfully singing the songs about continents and oceans learnt at school. This gave me the idea to encourage her to create labels to complete our map…
It was so nice crafting together outside, talking about the importance of reducing, reusing and recycling to protect the environment. It was also a useful geography recalling activity too!
8. Garden fairies
Sighting of little fairies in our garden! We made them with some rose buds, little yellow dandelion-like flowers (I don’t know their name…) and clover leaves. A bit of play dough for the head. For the house, we recycled a toilet paper roll and glued rose petals, sage leaves and some sticks. They lasted a few days but left an atmosphere of magic in our garden for weeks!
9. Nature Mandalas
During the first lockdown (Spring 2020 in the UK), the weather was so nice that we could spend lots of time in our garden and walking around. More than once my kids and I collected flowers and leaves and made with them nature mandalas, auspicious for those uncertain times. They were a temporary, ephemeral artwork, but we loved making them and sending our little message of hope and joy to the world. Since then, we have been creating them in our garden very often!
10. Spring Focaccia
To round off this collection of floral crafts, here is a garden-inspired culinary creation. Spring Equinox, on the 21st of March, was celebrated in our house with a surprise for my family: a homemade flower focaccia!
The idea came from a store magazine, with some personalisation of mine, such as more aromatic herbs and freshly picked violets, botanical reminiscences of their edibility…
Quoting my husband, “The flavours blossom in the mouth!”.
“Wow” effect guaranteed!!!
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