Happy Memorial Day + Paper Starburst Flower Tutorial

Happy Memorial Day!
To all those who have lost their lives serving our country, to our vets and current active duty members and families of the military.....
our family thanks you from the bottom of our hearts.

Dave bought a new flag for our front porch this weekend. Our old one was quite worn.
While he was hanging the flag I was busy making these pretty little paper starburst flowers to help us celebrate the patriotic holidays.

This weekend Dave and I took a little overnight date night...{we will share more tomorrow as part of our Dear Dave + April post} but it included a walk through Paper Source. There I was inspired by the storefront windows that had all these sunburst hanging in solid prints.



I knew they would be perfect in pretty prints and I was pretty sure I could make them myself without their kit.

I purchased some pretty red, white & blue printed paper from Paper Source and some Zots adhesive dots and came home and got to work.

Each flower takes 2 pieces of 12 x 12 paper cut into 8 - 6 x 6 squares.

Now here was where the harder part came....cutting out my own template.

I remembered that two opposing corners met together while the other two opposing corners were about an inch apart. I measured in 1" from the edge to create the first box. On the two corners that didn't meet together I stopped my drawing 1/2" from each end. I then came in 2" from the outside edge to create the inner box following the same guidelines.

Since I don't own an exacto knife, I used one of Dave's disposable small box cutters to cut through my template. I then placed the template over two sheets of paper to help move the project along faster. At first I used a ruler to follow the template cuts, but then was able to free cut it with the box cutter.

Next, using one of the Zots glue dots roll inside square together as shown.
Flip paper over and roll the second square adhering with a zot in the center. And then flip over again to roll together the last outside square.

This is your finished product. After you have finished making all 8 pieces. Assemble four pieces together by facing all the same direction, stapling bottom corners together and then stapling middle roll from one piece to outside roll from the facing piece. The pictures show this in detail.

Once you have two 4-piece sections stapled together....staple them all together to form a full circle.

Once I had my template made it only took me about 12 minutes each to make a complete starburst flower including cutting the template onto each piece of paper. I made three total to string together like garland.

I punched a small hole at the top of each of the starburst flowers and strung them with twine, tying them off at the right distance so they wouldn't slide. I think this craft might actually finally qualify me as a DIYer!

They will be perfect for the whole month of July too!!

And because this makes me an official DIYer...I'm linking up with my friend, Cindy at Skip to My Lou!

And, my other friends....Kim at Today's Creative Blog and Jen's Weekend Wrap-up Party at Tatertots & Jello!