Palm Art: Field of Flowers

Last year I wasn't able to get around to crafting with my palms until it was too late. They were all dried out and not bendable. This year I was determined to make new flowers for my sad looking (and dusty!) flowers that I made five years ago. It was time for them to be burned and buried (or brought to church for them to burn). Since the boys were napping and Adam took Nora to work with him, I was able to get some quite time to document the process and show others how to make them as well!

You can either work with a palm that it still together with it's two "leaves" or separate them and make something else with the other half. I chose to separate them. If you leave them together you'd just have a lot more flowers.

Next you need to split the palm into several little segments that are about an 1/8 inch wide. I ended up with 9 on my single "leaf."

Then you pick out strand, and figure out what height you want your flower to be (I like to vary mine so they're not all the same height. Then you start to make your petals. First, just make a simple loop.

Then make a second so that it looks like you have a bow. You're going to want to pinch the center to hold all the petal centers together.

Then make a third petal by bringing the loose end under the center of the flower and pinching it.

Then make a fourth petal by bringing the loose end over the center of the flower and pinching it.

The make the last petal, the fifth one, by bringing the loose end under the center of the flower and pinching it.

Now that you have all your petals pinched together at the center, you're going to use the loose end to weave around the petals to hold them in place. Start by going over the petal next to the loose end, then under then next one, then over... (you get the idea), making sure you pull it snugly to the center of the flower as you go. You will not want to include the stem of the flower in your over-under weave, or you won't end up with a true weave.

Keep pinching the center until you have gone around twice (once won't hold all the petals in place). Then you can let go of the center and keep weaving over-under until you only have a tiny tail left.

The tiny tail you can stick through a little hole or gap you see in the center to hold it in place so it doesn't unravel.

Once you're done with the weave, if you're finding you have unevenly sized petals (which I almost always do!),

you can adjust them by pulling a little on the smaller petal. You can play with it a little to get them all evenly sized by following the path you made with the petals.