Flowers with Shiseido Facial Cotton

*This was created in response to a contest that was held by Shiseido in the spring of 2014. I ended up winning a years supply of cotton in the end. I am merely sharing this post as a how-to*

Back in the spring, Shiseido held a contest on their Twitter account.

Basically, you would be send a few sample packages of their facial cotton, and you were to create flowers with them.

I ended up being one of the winners, and ended up winning a years supply of Shiseido’s cotton. Boy was I a happy camper, as they are awesome, just a little expensive for my small budget (but cotton has increased over the years, so I get it).

Anyway, I wanted to share how I created them, just if anyone was interested.

Since they are really REALLY plus and sturdy, I wanted to tie dye them.

I dripped the dye with a slender straw, on to the bottom of the pads.

I then dipped the cotton into a palette that contained a bit of water (not too much).

The cotton pulled the water and the dye upwards, creating a unique pattern

I realized that the I pulled up too much water, so I then took another cotton pad, and placed it on top. I pressed them together, and the dye transferred to the other pad.

I then took my pads and placed them to the side to dry out. On that note, once dry, they basically returned back to their normal plushness.

I then pulled them apart at the centre, to create to separate pieces. By pulling them apart carefully, I got a more natural edge, rather than a cut edge from scissors.

Then it was time to wrap them around my wire. This bit was tricky. I applied a little bit of glue so that the cotton would adhere to the wire, but too much glue and it would be a mess. I found that by rolling the ends a bit, it was a little easier to wrap around the wire. I kept going with alternating colours.

Once I had wrapped them around, I rubbed glue along the rest of the wire, and attached bits of the coloured cotton around it to conceal the grey.

Rinse and repeat…

It was so hard doing this to the Shiseido Facial Cotton, as I couldn’t use them for my face afterwards..or even to remove nail polish…but it was fun to create something lovely.