Faux Rice Paper Flowers

 

These beautiful flowers are made from Faux Rice paper, a simple combination of napkins, mod podge, and some patients for dry time. 

In this blog, I’ll show you how to make the faux rice paper and turn it into these flowers!

Let’s start with how to make faux rice paper. You’ll need napkins and mod podge. Any napkins of your choice will work and I’ve used pretty floral napkins before too! For this project, I’m using the white backing of a napkin. Make sure you pull your napkin apart! Some are 2 ply and some are 3 so you’ll want to make sure, you’re just using one of the pieces.

You’ll need to lay down a piece of plastic. Any plastic will work, but it has to be plastic or your napkin won’t lift up once it’s dry. I’m using a gallon size zip lock bag that I cut open, laid out, then taped down with some painters tape. You’ll want to tape it down so it doesn’t move around.

Once you have your plastic laid and taped down, spread a layer of mod podge on the plastic in an area a little bigger than your napkin piece. 

Then carefully lay your napkin onto the mod podged plastic. As you can see in the photo above, there’s going to be wrinkles because of the plastic underneath and that’s ok! Gently brush out any bubbles with a paint brush or your fingers.

Once you’ve smoothed out your napkin, grab some watered down acrylic paint (in your color choice) or some watercolor paint and start dripping the paint in random areas on your napkin. I put my watered down paint in a glass dropper bottle, but you could drip it on with a paint brush too.

Here’s what my napkin looked like after I dropped the paint randomly on the napkin.

If you find the paint has pooled in some of the spots, you can use a paint brush to spread it out a little.

After you’ve got your paint spots where you want them then you can add an even layer top coat of mod podge over your napkin. You’ll want to let this air dry completely. I left mine to dry for 24 hours.

After the 24 hours, you can easily peel your faux rice paper sheet off of the plastic! As you can see above in the photos, the “paper” will be semi transparent. It’s also super durable and can be shaped, twisted, and cut. It kinda mimics the feel of plastic/vellum.

I cut my sheet into a bunch of petal shapes. One napkin ended up making 4 flowers. Some of my pieces were just the white part of the napkin and others had some of the pink paint on them which was really neat!

After I cut all my petals, I layered them in my hand like a flower. I only did two layers and it’s easier to make these in your hand than on a flat surface.

To make the flower, I cupped my hand and used my finger on my other hand to press down in the center. Hold it firm in the center with your finger then slide the hand holding the petals back to grab them on the bottom.

Once you have it in your fingers, just give it a little twist, the faux rice paper actually sticks together quite well.

Add a little hot glue to a greenery stem (this is one I had from Dollar Tree) then wrap the twisted part of the flower around your stem where you added the hot glue

And that’s it! Enjoy your pretty flowers!