One of the rare, agreed-upon universal truths is that flowers are exquisite beings, and ordinarily, in the presence of such extraordinary beauty, the expected reaction is as follows: to marvel at it, to memorialize it, to smell it. And that’s exactly what happens when most encounter Sara Kim’s flowers, except that hers…are made out of paper. It’s a testament to her craft — exacting paper-manipulating skills that she’s meticulously honed for well over a decade.
Her garden of flowers is wide and expansive; she’s created hundreds and hundreds of different kinds (so many she’s lost count): hibiscuses, peonies, roses, hyacinths, daffodils, cherry blossoms, marigolds, all with tissue-thin petals as delicate as real ones, incredibly fine intricate details, and hyper-realistic like-nature-but-better colors. The result is a creation so lifelike, it could quite possibly fool a botanist — in much the same way bakers task themselves with whipping up and sculpting realistic-looking inanimate objects that are actually cake. Part art, part illusion — it’s a delightful, distorted version of the truth. And over the years, she’s produced thousands and thousands of flowers (so many she’s lost count), some done by hand, others done with the help of her Cricut.
It’s this accessibility that makes Kim’s paper flowers all the more intriguing — the thought being, If she can do it, then maybe I can, too. Crafting, democratized. Her paper creations will outlive actual flowers, yes, but by using an inherently impermanent material (it creases, it tears, it warps when it gets wet), she’s also capturing the ephemeral spirit of the real thing. The fact that it looks like the real thing helps, too — it’s a point of pride. She’s self-taught, and a lot of her technique comes from trial and error. But she was able to level-up her work, all with the help of Cricut, the purveyor of versatile smart cutting machines that, through precision cutting and crafting, empowers users to bring their creative, DIY visions to life.
She offers the ranunculus as an example — it’s her favorite flower to make, and in her opinion, the most realistic. Her technique: She prints and then cuts a very intricate illustration — a pattern that consists of little lines that she designed specifically for the petals — through her Cricut, and when assembled, the effect is a color gradient that mimics that of an actual ranunculus.
“I only started using Cricut in 2020, and it’s changed my life — my whole business relies on Cricut now. That’s literally what I do now, because I sell content and flower-making patterns that go through a Cricut,” says Kim, who reveals that her paper flower business earns her three times more than her previous career as a music teacher. “You could cut by hand, but some flowers, like Queen Anne’s lace, are so delicate there’s no way I can make it without my Cricut.”
Kim’s career as a paper artiste — or paper florist — started off as a side hustle, and before that, a hobby that can be traced all the way back to childhood. Growing up, she was always into crafting. Her family didn’t buy her “real toys,” so she made her own. And from there, her skill and her love of creating only grew.
“I’ve always wanted to make the gift instead of buying the gift — and that’s also what sparked my business,” says the 37-year-old California native. “My first true crafting love was the idea that I could make something beautiful out of paper, but I thought I couldn’t make money off of that — that it wasn’t a career. It was just a dream.”
Kim graduated as a violin performance major and became a music teacher; in her downtime, she’d craft as a way to wind down and relieve stress. In 2010, she turned it into a business, the first iteration of which was selling handmade paper cards, with paper flowers on the side. But she quickly realized that was neither sustainable nor profitable — she was spending an hour constructing these elaborate cards only to sell them for a dollar.
The second iteration of her business was transitioning into fabric flowers, purely so she could charge more for the same amount of work. She launched a wedding line, creating silk flowers and fashioning them into headbands or hair accessories, or sewing them onto veils. Paper flowers still had a presence — but they were more wallflowers, serving as a wedding backdrop, rather than centerpieces. Her work caught the attention of a major national retailer, and it was then that she knew she was onto something and finally made the leap to quit her “real job” to focus on crafting full-time.
The problem with doing wholesale and churning out the same flowers over and over again — in thousand-unit increments no less — was that it completely drained her joy of crafting. At one point, she had a team who helped. But when the pandemic hit, the wedding industry shuddered to a halt, and so did her business.
It turned out to be a blessing in disguise. Her third and final iteration of her business is the one she operates today: part content creation, part tutorials that’s rooted in her love of creating paper flowers ranging from realistic blooms to larger-than-life installations that are made-to-order for weddings or retailers. Or in her most recent case, for personal experimentation: a towering hyacinth that took her two days to make (and now sits in the back of her studio), which she documented in a soothing, ASMR-style process video.
“Half of my followers follow me because they like looking rather than making the flowers themselves, and the other half are fellow artists — I think they follow because I show you that you can make anything out of a piece of paper,” Kim muses. “That’s why I went back to paper flowers — the idea that you don’t have to invest all of this money into a craft. You could make flowers out of printer paper, and it’ll still look good.”
For beginners, the easiest is the poppy. The hardest, the rose (“Because everybody knows what a rose looks like, so it’s hard to make it look really realistic; I’m always unsatisfied,” she says). Her most requested: the peony (though after making more than a thousand for a brand project six months ago, she hasn’t looked at one since). She saves every scrap of paper (her extensive collection is tucked away and hidden in cabinets), and for itty-bitty pieces, she upcycles them to make new paper (or “special paper” as she calls it) for cards or for wrapping her flowers. And anytime she feels stuck or bored, she takes a class, whether it be ceramics or wood carving, for a spark of inspiration — but she wants to be absolutely clear: Even when she feels this way, she continues to love what she does.
“I’ve been crafting and making paper flowers for about as long as I taught music — and I still really enjoy it, more than where I was at when I quit music,” she says. “I’ve had to revamp my business, and I constantly try to learn new things — and in the end, all of it makes me happy.”
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