Spring almost came this weekend, the snow had all but gone, grass was showing – but then we woke up Sunday to another foot of the white stuff !!!

So I raided the craft supplies in my studio and spent the day making paper flowers with my kids. At least we can pretend its Spring even if the weather won’t play along with us.

Above are our paper poppies and below the tissue blooms we created.

If you want to spend some fun time with your kids and brighten up your home at the same time this is all you need. Scraps of coloured paper, cupcake cases and pipecleaners, tissue paper.

For the poppies, take a cupcake case. Open it out and fold in half to make a semi-circle and then fold in half again. Draw a petal shape and cut it out.

Open out the cupcake case and make a small hole with the point of a pencil in the centre. Cut out a small circle of coloured paper approximately the size of the base of the cupcake case. Cut a second circle slightly smaller and then snip with a small pair of scissors all around the edge of the circle, about half way into the centre. Make a small hole in the centre of these 2 circles.

To assemble the flowers. Take a pipe cleaner and turn over one end (about 1cm) This will stop the paper petals falling off the end. Thread the small circle on first, pinching the snipped edges with your fingers, so they stand up. Then thread the slightly larger coloured circle and finally the cupcake case. We added a little glue to the back of the second circle so that it stuck to the case.

These are really simple to make and all you need are pipecleaners and tissuepaper.

First cut out 12 circles of tissue. I used a coffee lid and as the tissue is quite thin you can cut through all 12 sheets at once.

Make a small hole in the centre of all the sheets and push the pipecleaner through, bending over one end to secure. Then seperate the top layer and pinch it between your fingers as shown below. Repeat this with each seperate layer.