[.ca] Origami Flowers: Popular Blossoms and Creative Bouquets (ISBN 488996116X)

Create beautiful lifelike flowers out of paper:
After finding the author's website where she displays dozens of pictures of amazing and beautiful floral arrangements from flowers in the book, I just had to buy it. I am very new to origami so I was pleasantly surprised to find I can create the majority of the flowers. With practice I think I can create all of them eventually. The tulips are quite easy and the carnations are easy and very lifelike. The Gerbera, Cosmos and a few others are a little more difficult as they require small folds with thick paper towards the end. The large majority of flowers require you to precut squares into pentagons, hexagons, or the 16 sided ones but detailed how to instructions are provided in the book. The roses, stock, cornflower and several other require more than 1 sheet of paper for the blossom. Most of the diagrams are pretty straight-forwarded. I've only been baffled by a few, but eventually worked it out. Templates are provided for the leaves. I would have liked to see more detailed instructions with gluing the calyx's on to the flowers, taping the wire and adding the leaves. A nice set of beautiful color photos are included in the beginning with close-ups which helps a lot with folding and assembling the flowers. All in all this book has definitely been worth my time and money.

Beautiful photography...poorly written directions:
The photography in the book caught my eye and without closely examining the directions I bought the book. The directions are extremely difficult, if not impossible to follow. For example, "Crease as shown. Fold down in half and bring the three flaps together while folding the section under each flap inward." This has stumped me for three days. The diagrams wander all over the page from left to right and right to left. It does help to have the photos to refer to though. There are mistakes in numbering the folds especially in the pansy flower directions. I have a good deal of origami experience. I am wondering if the directions were done by someone who does not understand origami? I keep hoping that the longer I work on the idividual flowers I will find the one that is the key to the others. If you are new to origami, this is definitely not the book for you. It is very frustrating to see the finished product and not be able to accomplish the same results.

Nicely diagrammed flower folds with pretty results:
I am a long-time origami fan, though my skills are only intermediate. I had no problem with any of the diagrams in this book, but I would guess that it might be a bit intimidating to a beginner. The absolute beginner who is not familiar with origami diagrams might want to start with a "easy origami" book first which shows the standard fold symbols with step by step instructions. Still, the standard folding symbols are not hard to learn, and there are no complex folds in this book, so a beginner could probably figure it out from this book with some patience. It could use a bit more detail on assembling the flowers. There are lots of good closeup pictures of the finished flowers, and you can figure it out from those, but a walk through on the first flower of how it is done would have been nice. The flowers are very detailed and nice looking when completed, and they are diagrammed clearly. I found no errors in the diagrams.