How to Make an Origami Butterfly Shadow Box

C’mon, isn’t this adorable?!

I made this as a gift for my sister in- law. She loves butterflies, and she’s been doing a lot for me lately. She is a mama to four beautiful kiddos, and I wanted to represent them in her gift as well. So, I learned how to make some origami butterflies on google and went from there.

This cute gift only cost me $20 to make. It’s personalized and budget friendly. Best kinds of gifts in my opinion.

If you’d like to make one of these for yourself or a loved one, keep reading. I’ll tell you how I did it!

Materials
*Foil– Most likely, you will have this on hand, yay, free! If not, it’s a couple bucks wherever you go shopping
*Shadow Box– I found this awesome 8×10 shadow box on amazon for $20. It’s great quality and comes with the mounting hardware!
*Dried Flowers– I literally went outside my house and picked up some dead flowers off the ground lol. If you don’t have any in your yard, you could get some fake flower stems from the dollar store, or dry out your own flowers for crafting purposes.

Tools
*Scissors
*Hot Glue Gun and Glue Sticks– I bought my glue gun and glue sticks at Walmart for less than $10

Step 1- Gather Your Materials
Make sure you have what you need to complete the project. You may have a deadline if you are making this as a gift.

If you are choosing to dry out your own flowers, it can take a couple weeks. For faux flowers and flowers that are already dead and dried like mine were, you are in the clear for a tight timeline.

You can always check around for cheaper shadow box options too. I was in a time crunch, so I bought the shadow box above with Amazon Prime. Here’s the link!

Step 2 – Get Your Origami On!
Alright ya’ll, I had literally no idea how to make origami butterflies before doing this project. Once, when I was ten, I learned how to make origami frogs at a Japanese Culture Festival. Maybe that gave me more of a confidence boost in my ability to do this, haha! It really wasn’t too bad though, and I think mine came out cute.

I literally just googled “how to make foil butterflies” and watched a video tutorial. It was really helpful! Here is the link 🙂 Thank you Crafts Club for this great tutorial!

Pro tip! If you want your butterflies to look exactly like the video, you may want to use foil crafting paper instead of normal foil. I was trying to stick to a budget and decided to use what I had on hand. It did take some finesse to mold my foil at the end.

Step 3 – Figure Out Your Layout
Next, I laid out my materials in different ways, in order to see what looked best. For my project, I had a mama butterfly with four baby butterflies, dried fox tail grass, and dried lavender. I tried different layouts until I liked how it looked.

Note: Be as delicate as possible with dried flowers. They are very easy to break.

Step 4 – Hot Glue Time!
Lastly, I strategically hot glued all of my pieces down. I tried to hide the glue the best I could, and I tried to make sure it was in spots that would hold the piece down. The butterflies were easy to glue, but the flowers were a little more difficult. Just go slow, try to be delicate, it’ll be beautiful!

Leave a message below if you have any questions, or need my help!

Warmly,
Megan