You’re going to go nuts over these flowers. I should have been a comedian right? But honestly have you ever thought of making flowers using pistachio shells? It’s a great way to reuse pistachio shells and an easy craft to make with something that you would probably just throw away.
To make these sweet little guys you simple need cardboard circles in the sizes that you want to make your flowers. My circles were about an inch and a half for a medium size flower. If you want a large flower try a 2″ circle. To keep this project earth friendly, I just cut up a cereal box from the recycle bin.
You will also need a glue gun and of course, rinsed and dried pistachio shells. For a medium sized flower, you’ll need about 30 individual shell pieces, give or take a few.
For the entire flower you will be attaching the wider size of the shell to the cardboard and the point of the shell will be the flower petal tip.
Start by putting a dab of glue in the middle of the cardboard circle.
Glue two individual shell pieces together to form the shape of an unopened pistachio. Don’t eat it!
Next you’re going to make two circles of shells. The first circle will be composed of 4-5 shells and simply go around the two in the middle, pretty much straight up and down. The second circle will go around that circle but this time you’re going to tip the shells back slightly, like the petals of a flower opening up.
Now you will have a center and two circles of shells around that. To make a more natural looking flower you really don’t want to do a full third circle with the shells touching edge to edge. For the third circle you want to fill in the gaps. Place a shell in the middle where two shells from the previous circle meet and glue it down. Go around the circle, only putting shells where shells from the previous circle come together. In the picture above these shells are represented from the lighter blue dots.
Repeat the same process again for the final circle of shells, represented by the darker blue dots. You should be out of cardboard circle. If not, do another circle until you do run out of space.
It sounds hard. I know.
BUT! It’s not. Once you get going you’ll breeze though it and it will be easy.
They’re so pretty in their natural color. Soon I’m going to try staining them.
However I wanted to paint them so I did.
Don’t worry – I didn’t kill them. I was out of pink paint, which happens when you have three little girls, so I was sloppily mixing red and white paint.
So when they were all said and done, we had taken pistachio shells that would have been thrown away and turned them into cute little flowers.
Now you have the perfect flowers for Valentine’s Day Crafts.
