H is for Hyacinth

I pinned this pin a couple of years ago with plans to use it for the A to Z Challenge, but it got bumped for one reason or another. THIS IS THE YEAR, THOUGH, BABY!

http://www.ssww.com/blog
/easy-paper-hyacinth-flowers/

I love hyacinths. When I was a little girl, my great aunt had some and I loved the colors and the sweet scent. Some previous owner of our house planted some hyacinth bulbs around a tree in our front yard, and it makes me happy when they bloom every spring (I'd be even happier if there were more of them, but (a) I'm not a gardener and (b) I would have to think about it in November when the bulbs should be planted rather than in March when they're already popping out of the ground after their long winter's nap).

A little vase filled with paper hyacinths would be bright and cheerful in my living room, and Nora wouldn't be attracted to them and knock them over as she would with cut flowers (more on that later). 

The only materials needed were construction paper, scissors and glue - easy peasy - but the directions were a little vague and oddly executed, starting with making the stem by cutting a strip of green paper, rolling it into a tube (have you ever worked with construction paper? It's cheap paper, kind of stiff, doesn't lend itself to rolling smoothly) and then gluing the long edge to complete the stem. Whaaaa? That's, like, nearly impossible:

You seriously cannot glue this to
make a tube the size of a drinking straw.

Nora didn't like the stem, either.

I cut the strips of colored paper for the petals as per the directions. So far, so good.

The next step was to glue one end of a cut piece to the top of the stem and wind it around and around, gluing as it wrapped around the stem:

When I finished, it looked like this:

Nora didn't like it, either. She tried to kill it:

Lest you think I'm just not that good at making crafts, know that two years ago for the Challenge, I learned to make exploding boxes, and they are beautiful and I love them and make them often:

I can't find a good picture without working
harder at it than I am willing to do right now,
but this is the inside of one of the boxes...

...and this is the box after it
has been folded up.

Apparently, at some time I forgot I had pinned this project and pinned a DIFFERENT hyacinth craft as well. I didn't use that pin this time, because the directions called for cardstock, and while I have TONS of scrapbooking paper, I was pretty sure my cardstock was too stiff to use in this situation (the writer was Canadian - is Canadian cardstock not as heavy as American cardstock?) and I didn't want to go buy anything when I DID have construction paper.

http://onelittleproject.com/
paper-hyacinth-flowers/

So you know what I did? Tried the second pin with just construction paper.

Know what else? I don't think the first pin was legit. Smoke and mirrors. There is NO WAY you could get results like that with the directions given and the paper used. The second pin had great directions, and had I used better paper like directed, I would have had a right nice hyacinth when I was done.

First, the stem was cut exactly the same, but this one was rolled up like a drinking straw and actually held together:

The colored paper was cut without folding and the edges were curled around a dowel or knitting needle (I used a make up brush because that's what I had without searching). It would have curled better with better paper, but this wasn't bad:

Not bad. I messed up the leaves, though.

The moral to the story is what you see on Pinterest isn't necessarily what you get. The first pin was fake fakey fake fake. The second was the real deal. Now I'm done with hyacinths for a very long time.

Nora didn't help the ugly one, but
she didn't hurt it much, either.

"My work here is done."