just beyond nutty.

I ended the entry about making boutineers out of old hymnal pages by saying that my paper crafting could get ridiculous. In fact, it has. Actually, it went soaring on past ridiculous, bypassing preposterous, and landing just beyond nutty. Because once you start asking the internet about paper crafts, the internet will tell you more than you ever wanted to know. I kept finding different styles of paper flowers, and I kept making them.

Just think: if I had never gotten engaged, I would have never known that I am apparently really into paper crafts. Do we ever know ourselves at all?

It really wasn't a big step from deciding to make the boutineers to thinking, hey, might as well make the bouquets, too. And then Josh said that we should make all the flowers for the whole shebang. I thought he was crazy, because that just sounds like a recipe for origami-induced carpal tunnel syndrome. But as flowers piled up on my coffee table, it didn't seem so off the wall.

A friend went to a wedding and brought back a vase of paper flowers from the reception (my guests will be encouraged to take home souvenirs as well). While I was a little put out to find that I was not such a trendsetter, I consoled myself by the fact that my creations were way cooler. These flowers were made of tissue paper and plain white paper. I've seen them made out of crepe paper and coffee filters, too. You can do some neat things because of the properties of those materials, but I'm going to stick to making flowers out of paper that had a first life.

Besides the hymnal, I've since ripped up an atlas, a calculator instruction manual, a pictorial German language primer, a bunch of magazines, and a Betty and Veronica Double Digest. I have put aside any qualms about destroying books, because I am helping these discarded items have a new and unexpected destiny.

I love the way the page contents, be they words or pictures or international borders, become simple inkmarks on paper once it's all folded into another shape. On the page, our minds are trained to recognize and translate them into the information they are conveying. When they are presented as designs on flower petals, we notice the shapes and the colors that were there all along. It is familiar and unfamiliar all at once.

Okay, I'm probably overthinking all that. I just think it's neat, is all.