A friend of mine "pinned" the above image on Pinterest and I instantly fell in love with the idea. So, I tracked down a tutorial on how to make them...which basically involves old maps (or books or any paper that has otherwise outlived its original useful life).
Amber at Fancy Pants Weddings was wonderful enough to post this easy tutorial for creating lovely paper flowers. Don't limit yourself just to weddings though, these could be great for any party, a child's room or to spruce up a gift (instead of using a bow).
If you don't feel like making them yourself, Green Cycle Designs on Etsy (where I finally discovered the original image came from), makes a plethora of wonderful items out of recycled paper products. And her prices are very reasonable.
Read more: Fancy Pants Weddings - How to Make Paper Map Flowers
(Images: Greencycle Designs via Pinterest)
Apartment Therapy's Sofa Shopping Guide
Nikki’s Sweet and Cheery Print Studio
Good Food to Share 
The Big Book of Small, Cool Spaces 
Apartment Therapy Presents 
The Eight-Step Home Cure 
Sprout Side Table
5 Things Paris Taught Me About Travel
Recipe: Ham, Cheddar & Chive Egg Bakes
awesome! just in time for valentines, too!
These are beautiful! And if you have the time, they're worth it. An easier-to-make variety is this. I made 300+ for our wedding last summer -- some out of colored paper, and many more out of old maps and pages from old volumes of poetry from the local thrift store. They looked beautiful! (Directions are here.)
Those map flowers are often used in kusudama, origami spheres made from many (usually 30 from what I've seen) modules held together with glue, string or sometimes even tabs that you folded into the models. They can be lovely and quite fun to make and if you make them small enough, they make lovely Christmas ornaments.
Original and pretty, I'll try that this weekend, as I'm not planning to leave the house (too cold!).
http://nordiskastyle.blogspot.com
Where do you the find old maps?
Some we got at the thrift store. But we also just looked in our car and realized we had doubles of a lot of city and state maps that we didn't need. And somehow we'd accumulated three road atlases. We kept the most recent varieties and turned the rest into craft supplies. Freecycle and Craigslist might be good places to check, too.
Good work tracking the source of the photo.
I've totally done this! I loved them until they fell apart :(
My suggestion, use glue not tape!
Thanks for adding another diy item to the baby's must-have list, you big jerk.