Kitchen paper and baby wipe Kanzashi flowers.

I had never heard of kanzashi tsumami until recently, when I saw the book "Kanzashi in bloom" by Dianne Gilleland. I don't have a copy myself, but I was curious enough to look up the very old art form on the intertoobs and found several tutorials showing me how to get started. I'd still like to get a copy of Dianne's book though, because she seems to have a lot of ideas in it that would make great gifts.

Here is a simple set of diagrams showing the basic petal folds. I just used the rounded petals for the flowers that I made for the kidletts.

I've made a few fabric versions of these flowers using the different petal types with nice neat hand sewing, and rather enjoyed the process. The kidletts thought the flowers were very cool and wanted to make some too, but well, they are three and four years old and as simple as this craft is to pick up, it probably wouldn't be at all doable for them until they are at least around six or seven, because it's quite fiddly. I came up with the idea of making some giant kanzashi flowers from kitchen roll for them to paint. The kitchen roll is the sort that doesn't disintegrate when it gets wet, so they can paint the finished flowers without them falling apart or ripping.

I made them a giant kanzashi each by folding the the rounded petals and stringing them on a loop of crochet thread. The traditional kanzashi it seems are made very delicately with tweezers and rice glue, but that's far too much faffing about for a kid's project. Here's a nice video showing someone being terribly careful about folding a petal (I was not this careful at all, and didn't use any glue and didn't even do the end bit of folding in the underside of the petal, I just stapled them on the bottom after I'd strung them together)

Once the flower petals had been drawn together on the string and tied off, I turned them over and folded over where the petals joined and stapled them down together to tidy them up and make them more sturdy. so, kitchen paper cut into squares (four squares from each sheet), a bit of string and five staples. I made another flower with six petals too.

After the flowers were made, I cut a bit of dry wall shim from our stash (yup, we still have loads left even after making roads for the train table, dresses, and roman army costumes out of them). The kids decorated the shims before I cut them to the right head size and stapled on the flower.

Then they could paint them with pots of watered down food colouring and hang them up to dry. There was some crazy chromatography going on with the purple food colouring. It separated into purple and blue whilst soaking into the kitchen towel, which was pretty cool.

Here are the happy lasses in the finished headgear (with a sticker for the center of the flower, although one of those craft pom poms glued on would look even nicer)

After I'd made the kitchen towel flowers I thought I might try some out of dried baby wipes, because they have that fabric like soft texture. I stuck a handful of baby wipes out to dry and then cut them to be square. This time I wanted to make smaller flowers for the kids to make a bouquet for grandma, so I cut each square into four smaller squares, then made the flowers in exactly the same way that I had done with the kitchen towel. They came out about palm sized.

I'd died a packet of wooden BBQ skewers green ages and ages ago with food colouring, originally because I thought I might use them in the cardboard flowers craft we did, but in the end the pipe cleaners worked better for that, so we still had the green skewers handy. I used a couple of plastic beads to sandwich each flower onto the end of a skewer with some hot glue. Quick and painless way to make a stem for them.

Again the kids painted them up with watered down food colouring. They really got into this, to the point where after they had painted the first four, I ended up making them six more, so grandma will have a bunch of ten daisies. Maybe we should give each grandma five daisies though. Cool thing is that both grandmas are 5000 miles away and these are going to be nice and light to mail to them!

They are pretty well formed, even after being soaked and smashed by the kids painting them. I could give them a quick squirt with liquid starch I suppose if I was being picky, but really I think they are fine as is.
They might make a cute and inexpensive gift for a teacher too, and I'm sure they would look a lot classier if you used some nicer beads for the centers.

While we're on the subject of kitchen towel... They make totally mean magic carpets too!

Our house is one where you are free to express yourself. Consequently Aladin feels comfortable in his desire to cross dress. Poor guy, it's so difficult to find a smoking hot dress that looks good with a fez.