Kiss Flower - Make a Folded Rose With Hershey Kiss Wrappers

I show how to make quick little roses out of Hershey Kiss wrappers. They only takes a minute to learn, and then about a minute to make. But if you make one for her, in front of her, it will leave a lasting impression.



I've been making these for my wife for years. I made the first one before we were married, if I recall correctly.

Now that I'm publishing this, I'm looking around to make sure that it hasn't already been done, wouldn't want to be unwittingly derivative after all. I see this guy; he's been making origami roses for his girl. Way classier, way more work. Another dude more recently demonstrates an origami rose...  Again, a significant step-up. I bet these guy's wives loves them more.

So maybe this idea, kiss-flower, is for more early in the relationship; kinda spontaneous; while you're still trying to impress but, y'know,... casual like. Save the origami roses for when you know it's real...

Step 1: Unwrap the Kisses Carefully

In fact the hardest part of the whole project is unwrapping the Kisses. It helps for later on if we can unwrap the foil and keep it relatively intact.  However the Kiss wrapper is kind of delicate, and the green wrappers are way less substantial than the red ones. The silver ones appear to be the toughest.

The other issue here is that apparently you can only get green Kisses around Christmas time. Valentine's day Kisses are red, but by the time Valentine's day actually rolls around the stores are all gearing up for Easter. So just before Valentines day, pastels abound, but it's harder to spontaneously produce a red rose with appropriately colored green stem without first hoarding a few green Kisses.

So anyway, when I first did this I used these red and green Kisses left over from Christmas. I saved a few of each so I could take pictures of the process. Life intervenes, and I don't get around to taking pictures until a year later. S'OK, I'm not planning on eating the Kisses, just taking their picture.

You know of course that I ate 'em. Didn't matter that they were like 15 months old. So now I've got that association going for me, stale chocolate, wife, love. Could be worse. Could be carrots.

Step 2: Fold the Head of the Rose

I've actually tried several different methods to produce the flower head. This one seems to produce the most reliably rose-like pattern. I tried to palm off some newer, more modern looking, carnation-looking, flowers to her (in the interest of time, I'll have to upload pictures of this later). She very consistently preferred these roses however.

I don't actually know where that carrot line came from, but i'm leaving it in, maybe the wife will know...

Step 3: Fold the Stem of the Rose

The first few folds really just cover up any silver foil. Later as the foil is folded and twisted silver foil kind of ruins the illusion, y'know, depending on how anal retentive you are, or for that matter she is.

One of the most important parts of this step is to crimp the lower part of the rose bud into the stem.

Then just loosely roll the stem up, making sure to hide any of the silver foil. Don't worry about making it too "stem-like". Just get it rolled.

Step 4: Completed Rose

The trick now is to roll the stem in your fingers to tighten it up. This is where the crimping the head and the stem becomes important. If they're not crimped together, then the head pops off when you're refining the stem. While you're doing this you can also shape the flower head a bit, to make the stem-bud transition more smooth.

Note that the flowers can be made with just about any foil wrapper, not just Hershey Kisses, but that most other candies have tougher wrappers (also the ubiquity of the Kiss makes the presentation such a surprise).

So now you're finished. The rest is pretty much just the presentation. I've taped these to birthday cards, given 'em in singles and bunches. Left 'em in places where she will find em. I will say though that the most effective presentation is if you start with two kisses and make a rose right there in front of her.

Happy Valentine's day baby. Love yer.

Step 5: My First Attempt at an Animation

 I took a series of pictures while I was making a few of these roses. I've looked around for programs that would combine these pictures into a movie. There were a few freeware programs on the PC side of things, but the simplest way on OSX was to just use Quicktime.

Quicktime Pro gives you an option, File -> Open Image Sequence..., that will open a series of sequentially numbered digital photos, and turn 'em into a movie. You can then use Quicktime Pro to export that movie into any number of output formats.  I'm not sure what format will be most universally acceptable, but the .mov produced a small, reasonable-quality animation. The .avi's looked terrible, so I have to keep working on this.