Plastic Flowers

Further in my quest in all things recyclable, I turned to plastic bottles. I had seen plastic flowers online (along with ones made of egg cartons), and decided to try my hand at it.


It's fairly straightforward. Find a clean plastic bottle, and cut it into a flower shape. The top two flowers in my pictures are a couple of my early prototypes. The red is made from the top
of a water bottle - I just made the neck of the bottle the base of the flower and then cut the bottle in half. I then cut down to the neck, making petal shapes. The blue flower is made using the base of the bottle. There are a lot of bottles that have a natural 5 petal pattern at the bottom. I just cut the bottle in half, and then followed the "natural" already made lines to make a flower shape. Both of these flowers were painted with tempera, though it is a bit messy and difficult to use. I also hadn't figured out anything to do with them. Because of the way they were made, I couldn't use it for jewelry. I could've tried attatching them to pipe cleaners to make a stem.


The other blue flower was made using a different method. I took a larger bottle - 2 liter (the other two were made using water bottles or small soda bottles), and cut flat flower shapes out of the main body of the bottle. I then colored them with sharpies, which is cleaner and gives a translucent color, and glued a couple of layers together. I then added a little glitter and a rhinestone, slapped a pin on the back - and voila recycled accessory!

The teens seemed to like this well enough. Depending on the thickness of the plastic, it can be a bit hard to cut sometimes. Cheap water bottles are the easiest to cut.