Some of you may have seen the foam flowers made by Crafters Companion. They are cut with dies. I designed these flowers so you can cut them on your Cricut! They are made from both 1 mm thick foam and 2 mm thick foam. The 2 mm thick is the craft foam you can get anywhere!
Crafters Companion even makes the stamens you can easily add to the flowers. The foam comes in a wide variety of colors and I have designed several types of flowers. I will talk about the foam differences and shape diferences in a minute.
What Do You Need:
- 1 mm and/or 2 mm foam.
- Iron
- Liquid glue or glue gun
- Flower forming tool
- Stamens
- Optional: heat protectors for your fingers
- Download File
Choosing Foam For Your Foam Flowers
You can buy the thin foam from Crafters Companion. I got mine in a mystery box. It comes in a variety of colors. Other people on Amazon sell the 1 mm foam for a little less but not a lot. but the sheets are much bigger and have to be cut down to use on your Cricut.
I wanted to see how the 2 mm craft foam I got at Walmart would work. The flowers are a little less flexible but it worked! But this stuff is dirt cheap and I love cheap.
The Tool You Need To Make Foam Flowers
First you need an iron. I have a little portable iron I use when I try sewing. I turned it all the way up and it worked great. Really any heat source will work but you need to stand it upright or heat side up if you lay it flat, so an iron is the easiest. The later Crafters Companion videos use their foil press heater but I think this was just so that they could sell more of them.
You need to hold the foam to the iron so heat protection for your fingers is helpful. The Dollar Store had some that fit on your finger tips. These worked great and I didn’t burn my finger once!
The flower forming tool is simply a ball on a stick. I had some for forming icing flowers and used them. The cnady that comes on a stick with a ball on the end would work too but I didn’t have any of those.
The stamens are optional but they do add to the flowers a bit. Usually they are wire or string with a little ball on each end. Fold them in half and poke them through the flower with a needle.
The flowers will stay together with liquid glue but it takes a while. Glue gun is faster but you have the little strings. Try both and see which one you prefer.
Cutting the Foam Flowers
Start by cutting the flowers on your Cricut. I cut the 1 mm foam on the Kraft Cardstock setting with more pressure. That worked well. The 2mm foam needs the deep point blade and is cut on the craft foam setting. If you don’t have the deep point blade, you will have to cut twice and gently pull the foam apart.
The download file includes 2 of each flower in two different sizes (four total). You can mix and match the cuts and types of foam if you want. Each thickness works slightly differently. I will go into that later.
Forming the Foam Flowers
Turn your iron all the way up and let it heat up. Hold each flower flat against the iron until it curls. Then put the foam in the palm of your hand and roll the ball of the flower forming tool around until the flower takes shape. Don’t worry, it isn’t hot enough to hurt you, just slightly warm. The more pressure and the smaller the ball will make it curl more. After the flower is formed how you like it set it aside. Form all the flower parts before moving on to gluing them.
Take the flowers and stack them however you want. Mix sizes and shapes to create your own unique flowers.
Affecting the Shape and Amount of Curl in Your Foam Flowers
First of all, the longer you heat the flowers, the more they will curl. Also thinner petals or flowers with more separate petals will curl more. The long thin 3 petal flowers curl a lot. The spiral 6 petal flowers curl a lot less.
The 1 mm foam curls more than the 2 mm foam. No matter how long you heat it the 2mm flowers will form a cup shape and never really curl over. But sometimes that works and is what you want.
You can also make bigger flowers. Just change the size before you cut it. It accentuates the above trends.
Some Added Options to Personalize Your Flowers
Crafters Companion sells a tool to distress the petals of your flowers. It is basically a little sandpaper to thin out the tips of your flowers. I haven’t tried this yet but plan to soon.
Also you can colorize the tips or centers of your flowers with a marker. Just draw lines from the center out or on the tips of the petals to add some variety to the flower. Any water based marker will work. Others may too but I only tried the water based markers.
Conclusion
Make these flowers your unique design by mixing and matching colors, types of foam or decorating them. Any way you do it, we now have another way to make flowers and who doesn’t love that!
These flower can be used anywhere you would use the rolled flowers. I used one to fill in a black spot in a flowers messy canvas I will post tomorrow but here is a picture.
