I am now the proud owner of wall art made entirely of toilet paper rolls and paper towel rolls. Total cost : 3.50 (for spray paint). I went all out on this one. Sometimes you just have to be willing to splurge on the important things.
Seriously, this project is the epitome of upcycling. These toilet paper rolls thought their destiny had them in a trash heap at the dump. Not in a million years could they have imagined something quite so glamorous.
I saw this project on Pinterest a few weeks ago and I even mentioned it HERE. Now, the Pinterest picture was slightly cuter because they had a cute kid looking all happy and holding the flower. I didn’t have any cute kids hanging around last night, so don’t dock me for that. The original project came from Inspirations Decorations and she did such a good job.
TUTORIAL
1. Collect a bazillion toilet paper and paper towel rolls. I think I ended up using some where around 30 paper towel rolls and close to 50 toilet paper rolls.
Though, it was really fun to ask people to save their toilet paper rolls for me. Their expressions were priceless.
2. Cut all of the rolls in to 1 inch circles. I could have measured, but I didn’t care if it was perfect. I eyeballed it and got about 10 circles out of each paper towel roll and 4 out of each toilet paper roll.
Next, squash them all so they look more oval than round. Sorry about this picture. Apparently, my camera was more interested in focusing on the items behind the paper.
3. Now start gluing them together. I used my hot glue gun.
4. One you have the inner flower finished, it’s a matter of filling in the gaps until the flower is as big as you’d like it to be. I had a big blank wall, so mine has a diameter of 31”. That took about 300 “petals” (calling them petals makes it seem so much better than toilet paper).
5. Once it’s as large as you want, then spray paint it. That was the only real expense in the project.
Total cost is $3.50 plus a lot of time. I probably could have done this faster if I weren’t watching a combination of So You Think You Can Dance (seriously, Melanie better win) and HGTV Design Star (Why is Cathy so horrible? She really shouldn’t take her personality cues from Omarosa any more).
See how big this wall is? My huge flower is dwarfed by it.
There are other versions of this project on Pinterest:
I love that last one! I’d also love to see what versions you’ve seen around of upcycling random items into something new?