Hello Fall and Accordian Flower tutorial

I was so excited to be able to choose this month's Design Team kit!  This is such fun paper and the colors are amazing.  While the line is 'Hello Fall' from LYB, it is easy to use for so much more than Fall layouts and projects!  I scrapped a photo of my daughter from this Summer.  The paper matched her her shirt almost perfectly and the yellow matches her sunny personality making it the perfect choice.

I used two of the canvas borders and layered them to help balance the large photo.  The brown and white flower is from the chipboard pack that is available from LYB that matches this kit.  It came out of the package as a rich dark brown and I used a white gellato from Faber Castell (also available at Scrapbooks-Plus) to enhance it and give it some shine.

The yellow print flower I made with a strip of yellow flowered paper from the kit.  The directions for making the accordion flower are below.  They are really simple and can be plain like this one with a simple scalloped edge or you can cut with a fancy edge using a border punch-- think of the fun possibilities!

 Decide how large you want your flower and cut the strip at 1/2 the size of the completed flower by 12".  Use your scoring board-- if you don't have one, stop by the store and pick one up!  They are awesome for all kinds of techniques!  The Martha Stewart version- which the store sells-comes with its own scoring tool and an envelope template-- all stored in the board itself!!).  Place at the top of your scoring board and score every 1/4".  If you don't have a scoring board, you can still do this but it will take much longer!

Once you have scored all the way across the 12" strip, accordion fold the strip.  Then trim off the very last fold.  Use a super sticky tape to adhere one end of the strip to the other.

You will then have a 'cupcake liner' (hmm... another project!?!) which you'll need to adhere to something to get it to lie flat-- it doesn't stay easily!!  I used Quick Dry Adhesive from Helmar-- great stuff that you can get at S-Plus and use for just about anything you need to glue!  (In retrospect, I should have punched a larger circle given the size of my rather large accordian flower to give it more support.  I would recommend using a circle that is about 1/2 the size of your completed flower or larger.  It is hidden so it doesn't matter if it is exactly a circle- I just grabbed the closest circle punch!)  

Here's the completed flower on my layout!  I edged the outside and top with a teal colored Copic marker for contrast.  I love using Copics for this type of thing because they 'bleed' some if you touch them in one spot for more than a second and give a fuzzy look... great for flowers!