Fresh & Pretty: Mexican Paper Flowers

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Even though I live in Miami now, I grew up in California, about an hour outside of Los Angeles. My family still lives there so I make a trip to California one or two times a year. When I’m in town, my parents love to take a day trip to Los Angeles, but specifically to a little tourist stop in the heart of downtown LA called Olvera Street. Olvera Street has a long history, dating back to 1930, and has been recognized as a central part of the Mexican farming and community life in the area. Now it’s an outdoor pedestrian mall filled with Mexican restaurants and vendors selling all sorts of Mexican handicrafts and souvenirs such as piñatas and sombreros. But the one thing I always love to see that always reminds me that I’m on Olvera Street are the merchants selling Mexican tissue flowers.

You see the paper flowers for sale in every hue, almost at every stand along the pedestrian walkway. With the New Year here, I thought of these flowers as a simple way to give the house a bit of a fresh and colorful look. They are actually pretty easy to make at home, all you need is tissue paper, scissors, and pipe cleaners or string.

Mexican Tissue Flowers

Step 1. Supplies: Tissue paper, scissors, and pipe cleaners. (You can also use string or ribbon if you don’t have pipe cleaners handy.)

Step 2. Size your tissue. I knew I wanted to use the yellow paper as the flowers pistils, so that would be the center layer. The white tissue I used was 12″ x 10″, the blue was 6″x 9″ and the yellow was 4″x 9″. Fold the tissues accordion-style, making the folds about 1 inch wide. Notice that to create a “stringy” pistil center, I cut the ends of the yellow to make like a fringe. I rounded the ends of the blue paper.

Step 3. I used crafting edger scissors on the ends of the white paper to give the petals a little more detail. Next layer all three colors of the tissue paper.

Step 4. Fold the layered paper and find the center. Add the pipe cleaner and tie around the center.

Step 5. Next, carefully start your fluffing! This is what really makes the flowers look special, so yes, make sure to carefully fluff out every layer starting from the center. Try to avoid fluffing or pulling from the edges of your “petals”, because it’s very easy to pull just a little too hard and make holes in the tissue.

Step 6. Finished! That’s it! You’ll have your own Mexican Tissue Flowers to use as a decoration anywhere you want, they even make super cute party decorations.

Frescura y Pureza

These Mexican paper tissue flowers obviously have no scent of their own, but another quick way to freshen up your home is by making your home smell fresh and new.

Glade® Clean Linen® Wax Melts are great for a background scent in the air making the house smell wonderful all day- one little cube placed in the tray of the warmer will last up to sixteen hours! Just as simple as these flowers are to make and create a fresh new look in your home, so are the Glade® Clean Linen® Wax Melts, just plug in the warmer, and drop one cube on the tray, that’s it.

I love the way the warmer looks on my nightstand, right beside my prized framed Carmen Miranda autograph. (I love her!)

Want more inspiration for easy ways to give your home a fresh new feeling? Check out the Glade® Clean Linen® Wax Melts website.

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