Tutorial: A bouquet of paper hyacinths
Daniel came home from school a few weeks ago clutching a little bouquet of flowers he proudly presented to me. They were super-easy to make, as he showed me, and you can make a lot of creative decisions to make this project your own - size, color, type of paper, etc. I tried lengthening the flowery part and they came out looking like hyacinths (or some other similar type flower - I'm not really good with flower names, so if you can help me out here please do!)
Begin with two pieces of paper, one for your flower and one for the stem. Any size, as long as it's roughly square.
Start rolling up the stem paper as tightly as you can into a little paper roll. Secure with tape. I cut my stems in half to get two stems out of one piece of paper, but you can leave it as is, of course.
Take your piece for the flower and fold it in half, then fold in half again, or else fold into thirds. Really, you can fold any way you like, as long as you have some closed-fold sides to cut into later.
Daniel folded his like the picture above, but to get the hyacinth look, I found it was helpful to fold like the picture below - into thirds, slightly uneven, with two closed folded edges on the same side.
Begin cutting through those closed folds at intervals, but not all the way to the other side, just like the photo below. Keep on cutting till you reach the end.
Now, attach one end to your stem with some tape, and then begin rolling, moving ever so slightly down the stem as you do so. Secure the end with tape.
If you use tissue paper the petals will fall gracefully; depending on the thickness of the construction paper you use you might want to tease out some of the petal layers. Other than that, you're done. Make a whole bunch and put them together in a small vase by a window - so pretty!
This last photo is of the bouquet Daniel brought to me - I love how child-friendly and quick this project is.
Next lay them onto a baking sheet {covered with tinfoil} and stick them in the oven. The tutorial I originally read said to do it at 200 degrees fahrenheit, but I felt like that was taking forever, so I upped my temperature to 250 and it seemed to work better. You need to leave them in the oven until the ribbon is completely dry. For me, this took about 35-45 minutes. You can just keep checking and see if the ribbon seems dry or if it's still damp.
Once they are done, take them out and just let them cool off a bit (it doesn't take that long). Then carefully unroll them from the spoons. I'm not sure why, but I failed to take a picture of this step. Basically, you'll have big long curly ribbons. Then you just cut them to the length you'd like depending on how floofy or hangy you want them to be (technical craft words there, I know...). I cut mine into strips about 3 inches or so long. You can kind of eyeball them and get the hang of what you are looking for.
Once they are on the pin, the tricky part begins. You have to sew it all together (the original tutorial I looked at says to use floral wire, but I wasn't sure that would secure them good enough, and I didn't want it to come unwrapped and poke my baby!). So anyway, I took the layered bow (floofed and shaped how I liked it) and stuck it onto my sewing machine so that the foot of my machine was sitting right on the center of all the ribbons (self explanatory, right?) and then I just stitched forward and back, forward and back, forward and back until I felt like it was nice and secure. 
The stitching can be kind of difficult because it's hard to get all the ribbons onto your sewing machine without them shifting from how you've arranged them on the pin. Just be patient and go slowly and it should work out fine! (It just dawned on me that you could also just hand-stitch them together with a needle and thread. This might be a less frustrating approach, though it might be kind of hard to push the needle through all the layers of ribbon.)
After it's dried, trim any excess ribbon that might be going over the head of the clip.
I just kind of inspected mine and tried to put the prettiest side upward (the pic above is of the bottom of the bow where I decided to glue my clip on. If you look closely you can see the stitching from the sewing machine). Take the clip, and add hot glue to the top of the ribbon you just attached, then place the clip onto the curly bow and push down.
Then just let it dry for a second, flip it over, floof it, and you have yourself a corkscrew bow to attach to headbands (or straight to hair.)
