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Queen Anne’s lace is one of the hardest flowers to make out of paper. “It’s a beloved flower—some people consider it a weed—but it’s got so many tiny little bits,” says Inga Ilze Peterson (ingailzepeterson.com), who creates extraordinarily lifelike flowers out of crepe paper, wire and glue. Their textures and shading, and their gentle twists and curls, makes the flowers look as though they’ve just been plucked at full bloom.
The challenge of crafting convincing flower facsimiles keeps Peterson coming back. “How am I going to do this in paper?” she says. “How am I going to capture that color?” A single, complex flower can take 15 to 20 hours. For petals, Peterson often stretches the malleable, crinkled paper into delicate forms that carry small, fleshy wrinkles. For sturdier stems and stamens, she layers sheets with glue and cuts and rolls them into shape. Paints and pastels bring stripes and ombre effects that make the faux blooms look as though they’re still unfurling. It’s a surprise they don’t smell like much.
Peterson gives monthly tutorials on Patreon and in person at WildCraft Studio School, and she’s also made a business of selling individual paper flowers and designing custom orders. She first made the flowers as models for still lifes. Painting in odd hours around her graphic design day job meant her live flower models often died before she could finish a piece. Turns out, making flowers was more fun. She took up paper flower making full time in 2020, and never wound up using them for paintings.
Still, Peterson’s work doesn’t stop time so much as slow it. “Paper flowers certainly last much much longer than fresh flowers,” she says, but, like fresh flowers, they wilt and fade with time. “They’re still somewhat ephemeral.”
See the rest of Willamette Week’s Best of Portland 2026 here!
