Post two of three wedding posts, consider yourself forewarned!  This week I am working on a centerpiece for my friend Laura’s upcoming wedding, a tissue paper pomander.  Pomander is French for “apple of amber” and was originally a sweet smelling or perfumed ball.  In Medieval times it was a locket of perfume, in Victorian times, it was cured fruit studded with cloves.  Today, it’s a beautiful ball of flowers.

Paper flowers are a strong decorative element for the wedding, so making the pomander with tissue in the bride’s favorite colors made sense.  Making the pomander is not hard – make lots of tissue flowers, stick them to a styrofoam ball.

The three cuts – Purple is straight edges, red is curved, and the yellow is laser cut bracket edge.  I think the bracket edge gives it an interesting ruffled look, without being too spiky.

When perusing tutorials for tissue flowers on the internet, I saw that changing the shape of the edge of the flower made subtle differences to the end look of your bloom.  The post on the Hey, Let’s Make Stuff blog illustrated it very well, showing the difference between fringed edges, scalloped edges, pointed tips and concave edges.  In a classic case of tool overkill, I knew I could use the laser to make the decorative edging.

Clean Laser cuts

Because of the nature of laser cutting, it was easier for me to cut the decorative edge, basically a repeating bracket pattern, while the tissue was unfolded.  If you were cutting the edging by hand, you would wait until you folded the tissue, so one or two snips would make the design repeat the entire length – like cutting a paper doll chain or making a snowflake.

The tissue is attempting to escape the laser, but the Starman will save the day!

Not that I expected anything different, but cutting tissue in the laser was a breeze.  I folded the paper 8 layers thick and didn’t even get the hint of singe.  The problem with tissue is that it is so light, though, and really wanted to fly up.  I had to use what was handy, in this case Ryan’s Rush Starman coasters, to hold down individual cut sections.  This post is still safe for work, though, right?

There are so many tutorials out there, I won’t walk you though step by step of making the flowers, but here’s what they look like:

Stages of making a flower – Step 1 – blue is the fan fold.  Step 2 – purple is attaching the wire around the middle. Step 3 –  red is the fluffing stage with only the first layer separated and yellow is the fully fluffed final bloom.

And here is the (sort of) finished pomander!

A lovely tissue pomander…

…hiding the secret it’s not DONE! I didn’t cut enough flowers OR give myself enough time to finish it before the post needed to go up. No worries, Laura, I’ll finish it before the big day!