Paper Bead Butterfly Tutorial

Good morning! Well, here I am up early way before the kids on the school holidays. Ususally on the school holidays I sleep in til they get up, but this is the only way I get a bit of quiet "me" time. Ahhh...so peaceful.

Anyhoo, here's that little tutorial I promised. Now you'll have to excuse my kind of blurry photos, as I took them at night as I was making this little butterfly, but you'll get the idea...


First of all you cut a little strip of paper, as wide as you'd like the butterfly's body to be. This little one is about 2cm, but you can make it a bit wider for a slightly bigger bead. The length of this piece is around 12cm, but you can cut it longer...it will just make a "fatter" bead. Cut your strip into a triangular shape, and then start to roll it from the wider end, making sure you keep it fairly tight.

Once you've rolled it up, glue that last little pointed bit down, and you've got your bead...now wasn't that easy!


Next up you need to make some wings. I cut out a couple of little hearts from patterned paper, or you could use a punch.


Overlap your hearts and glue down your bead and voila! It looks like a butterfly!



Now all you need to do is make some antennae to finish it off. Don't look too closely at mine though, they are kind of dodgy! I just freehand cut the antennae shape (can't you tell?), but you could put a bit of rolled wire or anything there to finish that part off.


For the wings, instead of using hearts, you can also use flowers, just cut the petals into a wing shape, like I did with this one here. This is from a layout that I did at the start of the year. You can see how I've used a much wider piece of paper to make a bigger body for the butterfly...


Well, I hope you liked my little tutorial, and have fun making lots of paper bead butterflies! I've popped links to my other tutorials in my sidebar too, if you're ever looking for them later on.

Thanks for stopping by, hope you have a great day :)