Foam Flower Crafts for Kids : Making a Flower with Pipe Cleaners

Now I'll show you how to make a pipe cleaner center for our basic flower. You can start by taking some short pieces of pipe cleaner, about three inches or more, and we're going to just curl them around a pen, like this, to get a little bit of a curly-q look. You can use any thickness of pen to do your curling. You can bend them, you can make circles on the end, whatever appeals to you. Then you want to twist them together. Then we'll just twist them onto the skewer. Now if we push our flower back a little bit so that we can twist our center onto the end of the skewer, like this. You can put a dab of glue here if you want that to hold, and then slide the flower back up to the center. Then just move your pipe cleaners around until it has the look that you want. Finally, we're going to add a little bit of floral tape to the bamboo skewer so that we'll have a green stem. Floral tape is almost like a waxed paper, and it's great for this purpose because it's not so sticky, but it will cover the skewer very easily if you just attach it at the base of the flower and then hold the tape and twist the flower down on a diagonal, and it will wrap the skewer right up so that you have a nice green skewer. You can also, you could make a bunch of flowers and lay them out and spray paint the ends, or use paint or even a regular tape. Another option would be to take a pipe cleaner, since you're using pipe cleaners anyway, and just wrap around like this, if you want to color that skewer without the floral tape. Let me show you a few other flowers that we did, show the variety of centers that you can get just by playing around with the different pipe cleaners and applying them to the centers.