A Handful of Lily's

I love flowers! I can’t grow them to save my life, but I love flowers and if I had the means would love fresh flowers everyday on my counter! Who wouldn’t love a collection of beautiful flowers in their house right? Well, if you’re like me and can’t grow them or afford to buy them each day why not create a special bouquet with your kids?









You need:

Green and white paper or plain paper and paint
Yellow pipe cleaners
Green straws or wooden dole or pens and green tape
Masking tape
Pen or pencil

Start by deciding if your flowers will be functional or just decorator. If you’re looking for functional flowers, than you can start with capped pens. Wrap green tape around the capped pen and, if you want, uncap the pen and wrap the pen lid in green tape as well. If you’re going the decorative route than get out your green straw or have the kids paint a thin wooden dole green. Make sure the dole is the length you want. (I suggest measuring whatever you’re going to be putting them in for proper length.

Next, if you only have plain paper and paint, have the kids paint both the front and back of one sheet of paper white and the front and back of the second paper green.

Once dried (or if you’re using white and green paper) trace the kids hands connecting the left hand tracing and the right hand tracing at the wrist on the green paper and each hand separated on the white paper. Repeat this as many times as you have room on your paper keeping in mind how many flowers you have decided you need. From here cut out the connected hands.

Find the center of your connected hands and with a pen start a hole through your green hands.

Using your pen curl the fingers over the pen as far down as you can and hold for a few moments. Release and admire the newly curled leaves. Push the dole through the hole. Measure using your container how high up you need to go in order to still have it fit in the container. Using tape or hot glue attaches your leaves to the dol.

Take the white hands and wrap them around the pen all the way down holding for a moment. Take one of the yellow pipe cleaners, cut it down so when folded in half it comes up to the base of the child’s middle finger from their palm. After its cut fold it in half and attach it with tape or hot glue to the end of the pen/dole/or stuff it in the end of the straw securing with tape.

Take the white hand with curled fingers; wrap the palm portion of the hand on your stem making sure you can still see some of the yellow pipe cleaner. Secure with tape or hot glue.

Repeat this process on all your flowers creating a very special bouquet that requires no water and looks amazing all year round! This is also a great mothers/grandmothers day gift or if you use pens a fun addition to your office.

Our children’s hands start off as one of the first things we check to help us know they were alright when they are born. We look for those ten little fingers when their born and hold them tightly for the rest of their lives. Anyway we can add those precious little hands that grasp our hearts makes, to me, the most beautiful addition to my house that I can think. In closing, wither or not you are looking to make pens more fun, take a touch of your kids to work, or just brighten up a room with flowers remember that in life you never have to look past your kids for the brightest blooms you’ll ever see!

Abby