Making your guest of honor feel extraordinary on her special day usually involves a corsage. Unfortunately, corsages made from real flowers are usually pricey and last only a day or two. I’m going to show you today that you can create a beautiful, modern corsage that can become a keepsake for a long while with products from Core’dinations and May Arts, a perfect match!

Let’s get started. Core’dinations has a really lovely, textured deep red cardstock in their Retro Mod Squad 12×12 paper pad that reminded me of the color of a fresh, red rose. I found an easy tutorial online (found here at ellinee.com) for a paper rose and set out constructing it.

I printed the pdf from the tutorial onto plain typing paper, cut out all the elements except the leaves, traced the pieces onto the Core’dinations card stock (texture side up) and trimmed those pieces. A bamboo skewer and hot glue gun helped the process. Since Core’dinations card stock is sturdy, yet flexible, I had no problems with construction or tearing of paper.

To dress up the rose and turn it from a regular paper rose into a corsage, I added a textured variety of May Arts ribbon: there are so many different kinds of ribbons available that you can really go in any direction that you want! I first looped about eight inches of the ever trendy chevron 5/8” wide Twill Stripes in Black (382-34-10) onto itself and glued it to the back of the paper rose. Next, I added a shorter length of the 3/8” black grosgrain (SX03), also looping and gluing. Finally, a ~5” long piece of 5/8” black lace (361-58-08) was glued.

To cover the glue, I cut a circle of black felt and glued that over the back center of the rose and ribbon. I attached a safety pin to the top half of the felt so it functions as a corsage.

The final corsage is pretty and lightweight. The rose looks so real and the ribbon adds just the right amount of fun and trendy to the piece.

I also made a card to go along with the corsage; using the same May Arts twill ribbon and lace as in the corsage for a cohesive look. I absolutely love the texture that ribbon adds to a card. An image of a rose was stamped onto the red Core’dinations card stock twice, and fussy cut. I sanded some of the pieces to give it fresh highlights, adding a touch of realism.

Try out different colors of card stock and trims depending on why you are making the corsage for your guest of honor- you could do a yellow rose and pink and blue ribbons for a baby shower, or match the rose to the bridesmaids’ dresses and use white ribbons for a bridal shower! So many options! I hope you will be inspired to make a paper corsage, and I’d love to see how they end up!

Blog post by: Karen Baker

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