Paper flower magnets

I love making simple paper flower magnets using pretty patterned paper. It's very relaxing just going with the flow with some paper and glue and a cuppa at hand. An easy crafty activity  when you want something that will slow you down from the demands of a busy day.

These are some of the flowers I have made in the past and sold at my craft stall.

The roses have been made with some beautiful  Italian Carte Varese paper.

I have also made them out of recycled paper from old book pages and put them into groups to make magnets which look great on a workspace notice board or on the fridge.

I made these magnets using pages of old foreign language novel pages that were being discarded by the library.

Paper roses are really easily to make using lightweight paper, a quilling tool and some glue.

I will explain how I made the rose flowers for the trio of roses magnet.

I used the following bits

Cool glue gun and glue sticks suitable for paper, recycled paper, scissors, circle magnets, circular glue dots and a quilling tool are the necessary tools. You can use a circle template and pencil to get a perfect circle shape but the roses look better when the shape is a little uneven.

A large circle and two smaller circles were cut out for each rose. The large circle is the main rose and I used the smaller ones to give strength to the back where the magnet will be attached.

The circles were then cut into starting at one edge to create inward spiral movement with the scissors leaving a rough circle in the middle where the glue will be applied the curled spiral together.

The slotted quilling tool was then used to roll up the spiral twist.

The roses will look something like these above. 

You can secure the base with a sticky dot like I have done.

This holds it in place but you can go straight onto the gluing stage with the glue gun.

It is important to use a cool glue gun which uses cool glue sticks as these are suitable for paper. The hot glue gun and sticks is too hot for the paper.

Follow the instructions for your glue gun and cool glue sticks, they usually need about 3-5 minutes to heat the cool sticks to the right temperature. Work quickly as the glue cools quickly, once dry it is transparent so don't worry too much about being precise, that will come with practice.

You can glue a circle to the back of the rose, glue leaf shapes and then another  circle.

Experiment as much as you like, this is what I did. I cut into the leaves and glued a fringed strip to the back of the roses. I used the quilling tool to create some curls resulting in a trio of roses design.

I attached three self adhesive magnetic discs to the back of the design and here it is in close up.

The other magnet was made by quilling fringed strips and gluing them together with leaves.

Here are examples of other simple paper flower magnets which I made.

This one was made with several circles and they were cut into to create some curves and these were then glued and curved inwards, the magnetic circle added at the back

For this one I used a flower template and a gold card and finished it off with an acrylic gemstone.

You can make your own designs based on real flowers by using flower shape templates or creating your own petal shapes and gluing them together. The possibilities are endless and if you want them to have a protective coating you can paint over the paper with a clear gloss varnish.