Sheet Music Flowers

When do you do when your best friend requests a Beatles themed baby shower?  Well you look and try to come up with a bunch of fun Beatles crafts!  When I was looking for music inspired decorations I saw someone who had made origami out of sheet music and knew that I wanted to try to do this myself.  I found some instructions for Easy Origami Kusudama Flower plus a video and decided to give this a try.

I printed out a bunch of Beatles sheet music.  I searched in google images for high resolution files (at least 2 MP) and those were a bit stronger. Ideally I wanted songs with lyrics on them so they could be identifiable (each flower would have 5 different songs), but ended up with maybe 16 distinct pieces of sheet music.  Some of the songs were repeats, but they were visually different so I let them count.

I followed the following instructions (the formatting of the page is a little wacky, scroll down and you can see the step by step images) or watch the following video when I wanted to make sure I was doing things die.

Before I got started, I needed to create my sheet music squares.  Since the first origami step was to fold the paper in half on the diagonal with the color side out, this is how I folded the paper to cut a strip off of my squares.

I don't think I've worked with rubber cement since I was in elementary school.  I remember that we would paint our desks, rub it off and make "bouncy balls" out of what was left... boy were we smart.

The folds, right before gluing

The cement is much goopier than I had remembered, and I was bummed to see that my brush started out split and stiff.  However since precision wasn't essential here I easily was able to assemble petals into collections of 5 for my flowers.

I'm sure glad that rubber cement dries quickly!  To assemble the flower itself I would glue two petals together, and then connect two pairs and a single to make the 5-petal flower.

What is sticking out the bottom of my flower?  Why that is a chopstick. I wanted to turn these flowers into centerpieces for the baby shower, so I needed a way to incorporate them into a vase.  While the 5 petals were still recently assembled (i.e. the glue was still wet) I dipped the chopstick tip into rubber cement and stuck it through the bottom of the flower.  It required that I hold onto the flower for a little bit so things would dry correctly, but I think my prototypes turned out really nicely.

When my goal became 16 flowers, I created an assembly line.  I created a pdf of 16 different songs, so I cut these down to squares, folded the petals and then assembled the flowers in batches so I could try to avoid having identical song pages in each flower.

Not that it think anyone will be looking at these flowers too closely.  I doubt anyone would notice a mistake unless they spent time trying to match the flower to the song.  I cut holes in an upside down box to hold the flowers up so they wouldn't get crushed between my crafting time and the shower itself.  

Sheet Music Flowers look amazing in all colors!

Stay tuned to see how the baby shower itself came together.  I'm pretty proud of what we were able to do for a lucky new mama-to-be!  (Happy Anniversary!!)