Paper Flowers I Made for the San Diego Natural History Museum
About a year ago, the San Diego Natural History Museum also known as The Nat reached out and asked me to recreate a variety of California native plants out of cardstock paper. Some of the plants were already familiar to me, but others I had never even heard of until I started noticing them growing right in my own backyard. Funny how that works.
Researching each one is honestly one of my favorite parts of this job. I don't love making the same flower over and over but what I love is coming up with something new, coming up with new concepts, and figuring out how to create a flower I've never made before with paper. I've always loved working with paper because it doesn't cost much and it's already sitting in most people's homes and that's exactly how this whole thing started for me, making things out of scraps, magazine cutouts, and plain printer paper when I needed a creative outlet on a budget in my twenties.
So I spent months studying each species, the shape of their petals, textures, colors before recreating them out of paper. When I submitted my first round of mockups to the Nat, I was honestly a little nervous. They had a botanist and a whole department that reviewed these and getting your paper flowers critiqued by people who literally studies plants and nature for a natural history museum can be terrifying. But they only came back with a few color tweaks, which honestly felt like a huge win.
From there, something really cool happened. The Nat referred me to a botanical art exhibition with the California Native Plant Society and I ended up submitting some of the same paper flowers I had made for the museum. I had no idea it was even a competition and somehow those flowers ended up winning two categories “Favorite Overall” and “Most Creative”.
I've gotten to work on so many cool projects over the years, but this one hit differently. I think because on the surface it seemed like it wouldn't be a big deal but it ended up being this unexpected stamp of approval that genuinely validated my work on two levels. First, as an artist. I'm very rooted in the crafting community as a crafting content creator and having this recognized as art and not just a craft meant everything to me. Second, the people who approved it actually studies plants. For them to say this was their favorite as a paper flower artist, I honestly can't think of anything that would mean more than that.
It also made me think more seriously about what I want for “handmadebysarakim” as a brand. I really want to bridge the gap between art and crafts. To teach flowers that feel approachable and fun to make, but with enough detail and intention that they could genuinely hold their own in an art exhibition. That's the goal! Something simple enough to follow along with but crafted with enough care to win a contest.
The Nat was under construction for a year now and they also had a team built the most beautiful handcrafted frames for each paper flower which made the whole thing feel like the perfect collaboration, the perfect pairing for the finished wall installation.
And now, after a year, it was finally time to see it all come together. I visited The Nat at Balboa Park to see the installation in person, and I'm not going to pretend I wasn't emotional. Every single paper flower honors a donor who helped support the museum which was an amazing idea and concept. Walking up to the finished wall, it genuinely felt like looking at a herbarium, those organized collection of preserved plants you'd find tucked away in a science library, except I made these out of paper!
Something else hit me when I was standing there looking at it, I've done a lot of paper flower installations over the years. Events, weddings, photo backdrops. But those were all temporary, and honestly, I try not to think too hard about what happened to those flowers after the event ended. Outside of the flowers people order for their homes and the ones I make for myself, this is one of the first installations I've made that will actually stay. And having a permanent installation that I was a part of and one that lives inside a museum is something I didn't even know I needed until I was standing right in front of it.
And check out my recent vlog where I take you with me to my visit and my collaboration post on Instagram linked HERE for a closer look at the flowers and the finished wall!
If you're ever in San Diego, go visit The Nat at Balboa Park. See it for yourself and I hope you'll love it as much as I do.
