I like making seasonal and thematic home decor with my girls and our beautiful flower garden supplies us with the ideal material for summer decor. We actually don’t really pick flowers for our house, we prefer to enjoy them in the garden and leave everything for the bees. Once every now and then we make an exception though and take a few plants for one of our little projects. This summer we have made this Flower Sun Catcher that’s hanging over our dining table. It’s made from dried plants and their parts that have preserved their color and when the sun shines through them it’s especially beautiful.
I’d like to show you how to make this summer home decoration at home, it’s a great fun for adults and kids and it’ll give your home a beautiful summer vibe.
I have a lot of crafts projects tutorials, so if you’re a craftsy person, check them all out here.
Table of Contents
Supplies
– flowers, petals, leaves
– hard paper / cardboard / evo foam
– glue
– home lamination machine + foils
– scissors
– pair of compasses – if you don’t have one trace round objects in your household – plates, cups…
– small round paper punch – if you don’t have one just use small scissors
– thread
– few sheets of paper and something heavy to put on top of them, e.g. books
Flower Sun Catcher
Dry the plants
We’ll be using only small plants for this project or parts of plants that are rather smaller. You can use larger plants if you want to but I find the drying and later laminating works much better with smaller pieces and I generally prefer them for this project.
Place the plants on a sheet – some facing down, some laying on the side…
Put another sheet of paper on top of the plants and some heavy books on top of the paper. Don’t place your plants directly inside a book without any extra sheets because the juice from the plants will ruin the book. Let the plants dry at least for several days, a week is even better.
After this time the plants should be flat and dry.
Laminating
Before you start make sure that you have the appropriate foils for your home lamination machine.
Open the foil and place the plants on one side of it (on the inside). You can place them all over the foil, however, I like to gather the plants in little groups that I will later circle. It is good at this point to already think of the size of your circles and make some groups of plants smaller and others larger.
Close the foil and pass it through the lamination machine. I use hot lamination here. Let the foil cool down.
Cutting the Circles
Circle your groups of plants with a pair of compasses or any round object at hand.
Cut the circles out.
Now use the hard paper / cardboard / evo foam to make the borders. The best is to use a pair of compasses and make one circle of radius which is a little smaller than the radius of the flower circle. Then, starting from the same center, draw another circle, this time with radius which is a little bigger than the flower circle. You can see in the photo that when I put the flower circle on the two circles I drew the edges of the flower circle fit between the two drawn circles.
Cut out the larger circle and then the smaller one. This is what you get and you will need two such cut out circles for each flower circle.
If you don’t have a pair of compasses, again, use plates, cups or whatever round you can find.
Assembling the Circles
Place one paper circle on the table and put some glue on it. Place the flower circle on the paper circle and put some more glue around the edges of the plastic flower circle. Finally, place the other paper circle on top of it all and press the edges. Let the glue dry.
You can cut the edges a little if you need to and then punch a small hole in the paper edge.
Hang your Flower Sun Catcher
