Flower Power: How To Make Pretty Floral Crowns

It's festival season, so why not bring the festival home with this brilliant craft activity?

Making flower crowns is a great activity for girls and boys alike, it requires creativity, imagination, potentially some foraging skills and is amazing for fine motor skills, especially the daisy chains which can be a bit fiddly!

All of the below ideas are totally open to interpretation, swap out any materials you can't get hold of for things you might already have, you could use leaves and interesting twigs instead of flowers or a mix of both, and cut out other shapes too like paper stars or planets. It is thought that the flower crown trend began in Ancient Greece, think Julius Caesar with his laurel wreath! Jump forward a few thousand years to the peace, love and flower power of the 60s and everyone was adorned with flowers in their hair and homemade wild flower crowns.

For some inspiration you could take a look at some photos of excellent flower crown wearers such as: Moana, Tangled's Rapunzel, Frida Kahlo, Jean Shrimpton in Vogue, Disney's Coco and anything you can find of the latest stage play of A Midsummer Nights Dream, the costumes are amazing!

Next time you are on a walk or out in the garden with the kids, make it a mission to collect some fresh flowers like daisies or dandelions- these often get forgotten about, but are rarely in short supply at this time of year and look lovely as part of a wildflower crown.  Making a daisy or dandelion chain is so simple, great for fine motor skills- not to mention strangely addictive! Kids can pick this up from a young age so don't be surprised if you find these all over the house from now on! Once you have gathered all of your flowers, simply give the stems a quick wash, and trim a little to neaten and even up if you like, then use your nail to create a little cut in the stem, you then thread the next stem through this and continue until you have made a 'chain' long enough to fit around your head! Then thread the last flower through and ta-da! If you made your crown with dandelions, daisies can be threaded through afterwards for extra decoration as the stems are a little too fine compared to dandelion for them to be part of the same base!

The undisputed queen of the flower crown has got to be Frida Kahlo herself,  any search of flower crowns and her image is sure to pop up. For this style of flower crown we have gone large with the flowers, all you need is colourful tissue paper, a headband and a way to attach the flowers, plastic twist ties work really well, or you could use little elastic bands to secure the flowers then simply tie or stick them onto the headband. Remember, the more colourful, big and bold the better!

For this extra fancy, fit for a royal crown, you draw the crown shape directly onto cardboard and cut out, you will need to cut out little 'windows' which is where you will stick the flowers and petals. This method suggests using sticky back plastic, but a quick hack to save going to the shops or waiting for a delivery would be to simply use side by side pieces of sticky tape on one side of the 'window' you then take your flowers, real, or paper (petals work especially well) and stick them to this, covering the tape totally to lose any stickiness! If you don't have a piece of card big enough to draw the crown shape and the band, you can just draw the crown and stick this onto a separate headband, or staple a piece of elastic to either side, you could even secure it with hair clips or bobby pins.

If you have little ones just learning to use (and be trusted!) with scissors, this flower crown is a great opportunity to practise. You could draw the flowers before hand onto some card or paper, use bold easy to follow outlines, then the kids can just cut them out carefully and stick them to a cardboard headband. For the headband just need a strip of cardboard measured to fit, for little kids especially keep this quite wide for maximum flower coverage, leave it flat for decorating then staple, tape or glue closed at the end. If you have some magazines you are happy to sacrifice or even some old gardening books or catalogues, photos of flowers would look great cut out and layered up collage style! You can really use anything here to create all sorts of fun flowers to stick on, scraps of wrapping paper, tissue paper, felt, and fabric! Egg boxes are great for flowers, you cut out the cup part, paint if you like, and make little snips around the edge that you can then fan out- they also work well as the centre of a daffodil!

This method does require some specific materials, if you do buy a supply of wool and pipe cleaners though, there are endless crafts you could make, they will never go to waste we promise! These tassels are quite similar to pom poms but even easier to make, you just need wool/yarn and a fork. The pipe cleaners attach to the tassels and you can then weave them together to create the crown, similar to a daisy chain!

Now that you're flower-power ready, why not show off your crown and set up your very own festival from home?