Guest post by Johanna Bless of Bless Nest Learning.
In this post I’m going to show you how to make a butterfly or fairy wings costume using pressed flowers and contact paper. Superbloom blessed the California hillsides this past spring, and it was definitely a sight to behold! We came home from hikes with wildflowers and pressed them traditionally: between large, heavy books. Some of the flowers lost quite a bit of color in the process, so I searched for a better way to preserve flowers while keeping more of their original vibrancy! I loved the results of the microwaving method for pressing and drying flowers, so that’s the process I’ll be demonstrating. I hope that you and your child enjoy each stage of creating these floral butterfly wings, and that they bring years of whimsy to your child’s play. I will forever cherish the memories of gathering flowers with my daughter from our garden, decorating the wings after her little brother had gone to bed, and playing butterflies as we frolicked in the field near our home at sunset.
Materials:
– Fresh flowers or leaves
– Microwave (or if you don’t have a microwave, you can press the flowers between the pages of books, or in a traditional press)
– Paper towels
– Glass or ceramic baking dish (approximately 9x9in)
– Contact paper (two pieces, approximately 2ft each)
– Sheer paper (parchment paper or tracing paper, approximately 2ft)
– Thick stick (ideally with a flat side- we used driftwood)
– Hot glue
– Elastic (approximately 1/4” thick)
Instructions for making the butterfly wings:
Place your fresh flowers between two paper towels. Use two layers of paper towels if the flowers have a lot of moisture. Place directly on top of the rotating dish in your microwave and place your glass or ceramic baking dish on top as a weight. This dish will eventually get hot, so use oven mitts when removing it. Microwave for 15-30 seconds. (If your baking dish doesn’t cover all of the flowers underneath it, shift it to new spots for each microwaving interval.) Microwave for another 15-30 seconds. Remove everything, and replace the paper towels with dry ones (or slide the flowers to a dry spot on the paper towel). To cut down on waste, I saved all of the used paper towels and used them for cleaning afterwards.
Continue microwaving in 30 second intervals until the flowers are dry, also rotating the paper towels and adjusting the placement of the baking dish each time. It should take a total of 1.5-3 minutes for each batch. Toward the end of the process, the flowers may be “pressed” enough that you can do the last 30 second interval without the top layer of paper towel or baking dish. This will help to ensure that the flowers are completely dried. Some flowers are prone to sticking to the paper towel, so be gentle removing them.
Butterflies technically have 4 wings, but for simplicity we just made a left and right wing. Using a sheer piece of paper to make the template for the wings ensures that the wing size and shape will be identical on both sides. Start by folding the paper in half. The fold represents the middle of the butterfly, where the body is. Draw one wing with a bold permanent marker. Flip the folded paper over, and draw the second wing by tracing over the lines of the first. Now open your paper and tape the four corners down to a flat surface so it won’t shift or adjust. The sheer paper will act as your template only and will not be part of the final wings. Tape down the corners of one piece of contact paper over the sheer paper, with the sticky side UP.
Now for the fun part! Depending on the age of your child, they can decorate by themselves, or you can help them. My daughter was about 3.5yrs old when we did this project, so we each decorated one wing. Beforehand, we looked at pictures of real butterflies and talked about symmetry and patterns. We took turns selecting flowers and placing them in the same spot the other person did so that our wings were symmetrical. Don’t place flowers too close to the edge–use the line on your template as a guide.
When you’re done decorating, seal the deal with another piece of contact paper. This time, sticky side DOWN. The best way to avoid a lot of air bubbles is to start the contact paper on either the right or left side, pressing down as go until you’ve reached the other side. Make sure that the top contact paper lines up with the bottom one before starting this! It would be disappointing to get to the other side only for the top paper to be crooked and not cover the bottom layer. Using a sharpie, trace the lines from your template below on to your top layer of contact paper. Cut the wings out, just inside the sharpie line so there aren’t any sharpie lines on your final project.
Add the butterfly body and straps. We used a piece of driftwood, but you can use any stick, or even a thick piece of cardboard with sticks glued on top. Hot glue the butterfly body onto the middle of the wings. Cut two pieces of elastic to serve as the straps that will go around your child’s shoulders. Measure them on your child before cutting and gluing. Glue the ends of the elastic on the top third of the stick, and the other ends on the bottom third of the stick.
