Last week, I brought you my great-niece’s first birthday fiesta. I had a lot of fun helping with all the little decorative elements that I love to add to a party. Here’s how to mae Mexican tissue flowers — we used them to turn everyday frames into fiesta frames!

Supplies

• Tissue paper in the colors of your choice
• Scissors
• Twine

Instructions

1 – For each flower, you’ll need four sheets of tissue, cut into sections that are 10″ x 5″. These can be all one color, or whatever color combination you choose. If you want multiple colors, the color on top of your stack will be in the center of your flower.

2 –  Now it’s time to make your accordion folds. Stack your tissue papers neatly, so all the edges meet. Start folding from a 5″ side. Make your first fold, as wide as you like it. Mine were about 1/2″ wide. Flip over your stack, and make your second fold. Flip the stack, and fold again. Try to keep all your folds the same width.

3 – Trim each end of your fold into a curve. This will give you the flower effect.

4 – Tie the center of the folded tissue with your twine. This doesn’t need to crimp the paper. (If you wanted these to be flowers with stems that you could put in a vase, use a pipe cleaner instead of the twine.)

5 – Spread out one side of the accordion fold.

6 – Time to start fluffing. All you are doing is very gently pulling each sheet of tissue up and out, trying not to rip the paper. The first layer you pull up will be the center of your flower. Continue until you have fully fluffed one side of the flower.

Here’s what the back side of the flower looks like when just one side is fluffed. I wanted a flower with a flat back. If you want a flower or pom that is fully round, you just need to fluff it into a round shape. And have a lot of patience. Pom balls are pretty challenging to make evenly round.

To attach my flower to the frame, all I did was add a 3D glue dot on the frame and then press the flower into it, and refluff a bit.