Paper flower gift for grandma

I am away from home at the moment struggling with a significantly reduced craft kit... I might post about this in a bit but for now here is a post about something we did before we left home...

Cakey has reached the age/stage/phase where she wants to make gifts. Before this, she was happy to receive gifts but did not want to part with anything she had made. I used to hassle her to make, or at least draw in, cards for family members but gave up after one too many disinterested scribbles were produced. If she doesn't want to, why force it? And now gift giving has evolved naturally.

It was her grandma's birthday recently and Cakey wanted to make some paper flowers for her. We didn't have a lot of time so we used the simple method of poking coloured paper patty pans onto wooden skewers. I have seen this done with straws which are safer for little fingers but I didn't have any. It turned out that Cakey really liked the sensation of poking the paper patty pan onto the skewer. She only pricked her finger once and then figured out how to avoid doing it again.

Go, that wooden skewer! And then into the playdough filled vase.

While she was making the flowers I found a plastic cup to use as a vase. I weighted it down with a couple of rocks and covered them with a blob of playdough. Cakey then pushed the skewers into the playdough. All of her pretty paper flowers were decorated with a glitter glue pen - don't you just love glitter glue pens?

Ahhh, glitter pens - glitter without the mess.

The funniest thing was while I was getting ready to go to grandma's, Cakey packed up her paper flowers by dismantling all of them and crushing them into her tiny bag. I tried not to show my disappointment as she was pleased with her packing effort. We re-created the paper flowers when we arrived at grandma's house. They were a little worse for wear but grandma loved them anyway.

Pretty paper flowers before they got dismantled.

For other paper flower ideas check out these fabulous posts by Hands on : as we grow and Paint on the Ceiling.