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San Antonio's Fiesta Festival is a colorful celebration of tradition. This article will help you craft your own Fiesta Festival flowers to celebrate.
Every year in April, San Antonio comes alive with flowers, parades, parties, sporting events, and fun. It’s the Fiesta Festival, and it’s one of the most amazing weekends to be in Alamo City. And one of the biggest staples you’ll see around Fiesta is Fiesta Festival flowers.
These large paper flowers are a beautiful way to decorate your home for the Fiesta Festival. And making them yourself is fun and easier than you might expect! Read on to learn how to make your own Fiesta Festival flowers and how to decorate with them.
Before we dive into how to make Fiesta Festival flowers, let’s talk a little about what Fiesta is. Fiesta Festival started in 1891 as a way to celebrate the heroes of the Alamo and the Battle of San Jacinto. To honor their achievements in battle, the residents of San Antonio decided to host a Battle of Flowers.
The Battle of Flowers was an immediate success, and soon other events were springing up around it. Early events included street dancing, children’s festivals, a Trades Display Parade, and an orphans party. Fiesta Festival has taken place every year since, with the exception of five years during the First and Second World Wars.
When the citizens of San Antonio first decided to honor their war heroes, they chose flowers as a way to celebrate. The flowers were a way to turn the horrors of battle into something beautiful and vibrant, a reminder of everything the soldiers had fought for.
Today, we make Fiesta Festival flowers as a way to remember that first celebration. Their beautiful colors decorate floats, and each year, we crown the Reina de la Feria de las Flores.
The first step to making beautiful Fiesta Festival flowers is to choose your tissue paper. You can also use crepe paper, the wrinkly material that comes in strips or rolls, for this, but your flowers will wind up smaller. Large, flat sheets of tissue paper are easier to work with and will generate beautiful, fluffy flowers.
Go for bright, bold colors for your tissue paper when you’re making Fiesta flowers. Pick something that will match your décor scheme or use every color to make a rainbow. You can use as many or as few colors as you like, but you’re going to want about ten sheets of paper.
You’re going to start by stacking all your tissue paper on top of each other and fan folding them. Start by folding the long edge of your paper over about 1 ½ inches. Flip your paper over and fold that edge back another 1 ½ inches; continue this way until the entire paper is folded up.
Once you have your paper folded, cut off about six to twelve inches of cotton string. Tie a tight knot around the middle of your tissue paper, leaving the tails long. You want the knot tight enough to sit close to the paper without squishing or tearing it.
With your string in place, take a good pair of sharp scissors and begin to trim the ends of the tissue paper. You’re going to cut from one side of the paper up to the corner. You can give this a slight curve or make it a sharp point, depending on the look you want for your flower.
After you trim both ends of your paper, spread it out around your string to make a sort of bowtie shape. From there, you’re going to begin lifting each layer of tissue paper up to fluff out your flower. Fold each piece up one at a time, fluffing it until your creation begins to look like one of the beautiful Fiesta flowers.
There are a number of gorgeous ways you can display your Fiesta flower. The simplest is to use the tails from your string knot to hang it on the wall. You can tape it up with painter’s tape since these flowers are very light and don’t require much support.
You may also want to make a number of differently sized flowers to use as a table centerpiece. You can tie flowers on top of gifts or create garlands of them. You could use smaller flowers to create headdresses, or you could hang these flowers from trees or cabinets indoors.
If you’re still feeling crafty after making your fiesta flowers, you might want to consider turning them into a wreath. Start with a foam wreath ring that’s used for making flower arrangement wreaths. Wrap it in floral poly ribbon, overlapping the sides a bit as you go and securing the beginning and end pieces with hot glue.
Take a piece of thin wire and wrap it around the string knot at the center of one of your smaller Fiesta flowers. Trim the string tails and twist the wire into a spike. Poke that spike through your ribbon and into your foam wreath; repeat until your wreath is as filled with Fiesta flowers as you like!
Fiesta Festival flowers are a gorgeous tradition that reminds us of victory in battle and the beauty of home. Making your own is simpler than you may think and can be a beautiful way to decorate your home for the Festival. Where will you display your Fiesta flowers this year?
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Filed Under: Battle of the Flowers Parade, Fiesta Fashion, Fiesta Parade, Fiesta San Antonio Tradition, History of Fiesta San Antonio, San Antonio, Texas Tradition
Tagged With: colorful fiesta flowers, fiesta festival, fiesta festival flowers, fiesta parade, Reina de la Feria de las Flores, San Antonio Fiesta
