Blessed St Therese Petals Craft

I wanted to share our latest craft, that has enabled us to really look after the blessed St Therese roses we received on the feast of St Therese on the 1st of October and made it really easy and attractive for distribution.

Our choir was invited again for the second year to sing for the Carmelite sisters in NSW Australia. Here is the beautiful monastery that overlooks beautiful rolling hillside, even though it is in the centre of town. (A lovely town on a high ridge.)

My children had a simply wonderful day at Carmel.

Particularly my youngest.

My youngest boys were honoured to serve for the feast.

Here we are chanting the feast day Mass for St Therese.

What could be better? A spray of blessed St Therese roses in one hand, a little bag of goodies in another...

The tradition for the feast is the blessing of roses in St Therese's honour. Our children all went up after the blessing to receive a rose. They were all beautifully scented, home grown by the sisters are Carmel. We came home with a handful, the fragrance filled the car.

Once we got home, we carefully dried out the petals and stored them in a clip lock container, so that we could distribute the blessed roses to family and friends. I was thinking what would be the best way to give out this rose petals? I thought about laminating them, but I didn't like the idea of not being able to touch petal itself. So I came up with this craft I have photographed below, step by step.

I went to the craft store and bought a maroon sheet (looks a bit brown in this photo, but it is a beautiful wine colour) of mounting board. Mounting board is thicker than normal cardboard, it is the same thickness of sheet that would be used by framers to create boarders within a framed picture.
I looked at all the scrapbooking paper with beautiful colours and designs and wondered, just wondered if I would find what I was looking for...and I sure did!!! A BEAUTIFUL sheet of smoky pink paper with beautiful, fine markings of roses, flowers and leaves. Perfect!

I looked at all the cutters and found a lovely cutter in the shape of a flower..just what I needed.

So I cut the scrapbooking paper into rectangular pieces, 4cm by 3.3cm. I also cut the wine coloured mounting board into pieces exactly the same size, so they matched in size and shape. Then I took the cutter and stamped a flower out of the middle of the scrapbooking paper.

I flipped the scrapbooking paper over on it's back and took a little piece of a blessed rose petal and placed it over the cut out flower and used masking tape (paper based) to hold it down and secure it.
Then I glued the scrapbooking piece to the wine coloured mounting board, back to back. As you can see in the photo above, the middle piece is the front, where you can see the blessed petal. On the back (which you can see on either side, in the photo) I wrote with a lovely calligraphy pen, "Blessed Rose of St Therese 1 Oct 2011" All finished, nicely protected, yet the petal can be touched.

Here I have made 50 to send back to the Carmelite Monastery for distribution throughout the year. I have also made quite a few for myself, so that I can distribute to family and friends.

It is such a beautiful sight, all the petal colours and the really beautiful paper.

The girls and I had so much fun, choosing out the different petals to mount, trying to vary the colours...there were so many colours!

My youngest daughter had brought home from Carmel a beautiful blessed spray of miniature roses which we also dried out. You can see it below, on a little Our Lady of Guadalupe altar I have in my bedroom.
I love it, the spray sits perfectly on the little altar.