How to Make a 3-D Rose to Hang on a Ceiling

Use essential oils on artificial flowers to add fragrance to your room.

Tissue or fabric roses offer a beautiful three-dimensional decoration to your living space and they last longer than live flowers. Whether you place them on long stems in a table vase or hang them from the ceiling in delightful bouquets, artificial flowers will offer a romantic air to your surroundings. Infusing them with a rose scent adds a touch of aromatherapy to the space. Whether you choose paper or fabric, you use the same assembly instructions to create these attractive flowers.

Things You'll Need

• Fabric or tissue paper
• Spray starch
• Scissors
• Ruler
• Pipe cleaner
• Dowel
• Watercolor, fabric paint or glitter paint
• Paintbrush
• Rose essential oil
• Floral tape
• Monofilament line
• Tack

Instructions

1. Spray the fabric with liquid starch to give it a little more body. Allow the starch to dry before scrunching the fabric by hand to give it a slightly wrinkled appearance. Use fabric with mottled pastel colors or use solid colors you can paint with contrast watercolors.

2. Cut 10 4-inch-by-8-inch fabric strips per flower. Fold the fabric in half and trim the open end into petal shapes with a pair of scissors. The petals don’t need to look uniform, as they aren’t uniform in real flowers. Slide 3 inches of a pipe cleaner into the fabric fold and bend the pipe cleaner down to wrap around the longer end of the pipe cleaner.

3. Fan the petals out and begin to shape them into a spiral flower. Curl the outermost edges of the inside petals toward the interior of the flower around a dowel to give them a curled look. Curl the outside petals in the opposite direction toward the exterior of the flower and let the middle layers remain upright. Mist the curls with spray starch and let the fabric dry a couple of minutes if it doesn’t want to hold the curl.

4. Paint the ends of the petals with a light water color wash to give some colorful contrast to the curl section of the petals. Use diluted watercolor or fabric paint and a light paint stroke to smudge the color on. Alternatively, use diluted glitter paint to make the ends of the flower petals sparkle. Mix 2 drops of essential rose oil in to paint to give the flower a realistic scent.

5. Cut three 3-inch-by-6-inch strips of green fabric per flower for the leaves. Fold the strips in half and cut the ends of the strips into leaf shapes. Paint veins on the leaves if you desire.

6. Use green floral tape to wind around the base of the petals, pulling the tape tight to give the petals added support. Add one folded leaf strip to the pipe cleaner just below the base of the flower and wrap the base of the leaves onto the stem with the floral tape. Add a second leaf strip about 1 inch down and balance the third strip below that. Continue wrapping with the tape until you reach the end of the pipe cleaner.

7. Attach monofilament line to the stem and suspend the rose from the ceiling with a tack.

Tips & Warnings

• Bunch three or four flowers together and wrap the stems together to create beautiful rose bouquets.