Rolled paper flowers tutorial, 40+ free templates SVG

Everyone believes that rolled paper flowers are the easiest and quickest paper flower design to make a 3D paper flower.

It’s true, but it’s really time-consuming.

No worries, we have some ideas that could save you time, and your DIY projects are still amazing.

The advantages and disadvantages of rolled paper flowers:

It’s quick and easy to roll the 3-D flowers from those rolled flower templates.

The petal shape in rolled flower template could be the same or different. So you could make so many kinds of paper flowers from these rolling ideas. We will design and keep updating more rolled flower templates soon.

Except for the spiral shape paper flowers, other rolled flowers which have a lot of petals are designed for cutting machines. It’s difficult to hand-cut those intricated templates. So we only have 1 PDF spiral shape template and only SVG/DXF digitals files for the rest.

The template is much larger than the finished flower. For example, we can only make the biggest final rolled flower of around 3.5″- 4″ from the largest 11″ template. It means we can only make small flowers from rolled paper flower templates. And it seems forever to fulfill the 20×20 shadow boxes with just those tiny flowers without leaves and foliage.

The arrangement of the flower’s petals is just random, which is very appropriate for flowers like paper roses, and paper daisies… but it’s hard to make a beautiful paper succulent this way because the petals of the succulent need to be exactly interleaved.

The angle of the petals of rolled flowers is almost vertical, only the outer petals could be bent to have horizontal angles. So this rolling technique is not appropriate to be applied to the flat flower shapes.

Some great ideas to make beautiful rolled paper flower craft projects

These are not my photos, I got them from the internet and can’t track whom to credit for. Please let me know the authors’ names.

Shadow boxes:

I saw many beautiful shadow boxes full of rolled paper flowers vertically and horizontally, it needs a whole bunch of flowers, which means a lot of cutting and rolling, and a lot of time.

People don’t like the blank spaces between the flowers. Making a shadow box from beautiful flowers with different sizes and different colors like in picture #6 above will fix those blank spaces.

And I would like to suggest that we could use some leaves and foliage templates to decrease your precious time by making less flowers, like picture #2 or DreamyPosy’s below.

Paper flower bouquets.

Yes, a small bouquet of small flowers, why not? If you want to make a wedding bouquet, hot glue the rolled paper flowers to florist wire and add some leaf shapes and foliage, like in picture #1 above.

The 3D flower cards

Picture #3 should be a beautiful gift card. This should be the simplest and easiest rolled paper flower template. We have both free SVG and PDF files for you below.

3D paper flower picture or cute wooden sign.

This beautiful paper rose is MIM’s new rose design.

It looks like real flowers, right?

Cake toppers

I always recommend layers when making cake toppers. You want a minimum of 2 layers (sometimes even 3-4 depending on the weight of the card stock) for stability. Some people like to mirror the design and then glue them together so they are the same from both sides.

And so on…

Materials and tools

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Cutting machine: Cricut Maker or Cricut Air Explorer are both fine for this project. Cricut Joy can cut the template less than 4.5″ cut and the final flower is less than 1,5″.

The best paper for these rolled paper flowers is 50 – 65 lb cardstock paper, depending on your flower size. Paper sometimes makes the difference, if it’s too thick it really doesn’t want to roll right or hard to curve the petals. Try a lighter paper and get the feel of it.

The recommended paper is solid core cardstock, the kind of paper without the white core. You can look at the outside edge to see if it is. We have some recommended cardstock brands, like this one.

We use a hot glue gun because it dries quickly and you can easily put a bigger blob of glue on. Also gets in between some of the folds so holds really well

For rolling tools, you can use your hands (pic #1 below), a toothpick or dowel (pic#2), a tweezer (pic#3), a bobby pin (pic#4), a quilling tool bought from the craft store or DIY quilling tool from a needle that been cut the top (pic#5), the end of Cricut weeding tool (pic#6), and a drill if you want to make a lot of rolled flowers.

This electric quilling tool also works great

You have a lot more control of the flower and you can manipulate it better by hand. For me, it’s not how fast I can make them but how pretty they come out. I never had a good experience with the drill.

While using a drill, make sure you wear a glove. The paper cuts done at speed hurt. Just put the quilling tool/ a bobby pin/ a DIY quilling tool in a drill with a chuck and have fun.

DIY quilling tool for both hand rolling and drill rolling:

Just using a bobby pin. Another way is using 2 toothpicks and wrapping electrical tape at the base of them. That keeps the paper from sliding down as I’m rolling my flowers.

We don’t like the idea to make a quilling tool from a disposable chopstick/wood dowel because it’s too big for such a small flower that needs really tight center.

Some important tips, easy steps, and techniques to make a rolled flower

We find the easiest way to keep the flowers together is to glue them straight to another piece of card/paper that you are using. Once dry, trim of the access card/paper off the bottom of the flower. Then glue the flower down to the frame. This secures the flowers much better and is definitely less fiddly.

We found it easier to roll the entire flower tightly and then adjust it to where I wanted it. Rolling tight first because it’s easier to work with once the flower has the basic shape.

In the video tutorial, you will see just the simple steps to make rolled flower paper

• 1. Grab the outer end with tweezers and start rolling toward to middle of the spiral, which means we start from the center of the flower.
• 2. When you get close to the middle you can use your hands.
• 3. Release a little bit so that the outer petal loosens up.
• 4. Secure with hot glue.

Bending petals before or after rolling? Either way works. For me, after the glue sets, I used the skinny dowel to curve the edges of the petals for a more natural flower.

For coloring the flower: We love using a dauber and Silky Pastel to color the edge of the petals before rolling the rolled flowers. By using silky pastels, we have more color choices and are much cheaper than using PalPastel.

The sizing chart of rolled paper flowers.

The sizing is different for each template, just take a reference.

Tip #1: But by rolling really tight at the center and loosening up at the outer, your flower is bigger and rolling too tight from start to end.

Fixing some common mistakes while rolling the flower

Here are some common mistakes when we began rolling these flowers.

With the motto: Really tight in the center, loosen outside, the picture will explain all.

Rolled paper flower templates

To make beautiful rolled paper flowers, we need qualified paper flower templates and some tips that we will share above.

Cricut Design Space has some templates of rolled paper flowers there already, and here is their #ID.

But you have to pay for the Cricut Access to get it cut on your Cricut machine.

So here we are offering here our huge collection of rolled paper flower templates. These are our new designs from scratch, so you’ve never found it anywhere before.

The free rolled paper flower SVG templates are for the Cricut cutting machine, while the DXF files are free Silhouette cut file templates (work with Cameo cutting machine).

It took me several days to design and test these templates, but I haven’t shoot the photo yet, will update soon.

Here is my design for the rolled rose SVG template last year, check this out

The free templates are for personal use only, please buy my commercial license for commercial use.

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MIM’s new design for the rose flower and foliage is so impressive.

Happy crafting,

Ann & MIM