STILLWATER, Okla. — Jenny Jafek-Jones’ business started with a wedding – hers – and a lot of patience and experimentation.

Jafek–Jones decided to make the flower arrangements for her May 2009 wedding. She said she felt it would save money even though she didn’t have any experience.

“It didn’t matter that I’d never arranged flowers before, that’s what the Internet is for,” she said.

Jafek-Jones found information about origami flowers, and folded some, but they were too abstract. She tried floral punch art, but the results weren’t “real” enough.

She also tried some Martha Stewart paper flower kits which helped her with the basics, but she wanted more.

“I just keep digging. I finally found … some books from the ’20s and ’30s when people made tissue and crepe paper flowers,” she said.

Those books, produced by the Dennison company, were the starting point. “I found a few of those and some of those had really great patterns that looked really real. Others you could sort of tell what the flower was.”

Jafek-Jones’ next step was to take real flowers apart petal-by-petal to see how they grew. She also continued to shape tissue and crepe paper to make the paper petals look real.

“The joke around here is when my husband buys me real flowers he tells me, ‘You can’t take those apart.’ ”

She said she started feeling confident enough in her paper flowers to sell them. She started at county and state fairs and a Stillwater craft mall. She eventually concluded she needed to raise the prices of her flowers because of the time involved in making a flower.

She shunned a traditional brick-and-mortar building for a Web store that linked to social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter. A few months ago, she took part of the family’s federal tax refund and hired someone to revamp the Web site – thecrimsonpoppy.com.

She receives orders from California, Pennsylvania and Oklahoma on the site.

Jafek-Jones said she recently filled an order for 40 Ruby Red roses for a couple’s 40th-anniversary celebration.

Oklahoma City resident Erin Cooper has ordered paper flowers from Jafek-Jones twice – once for a funeral and once for a birthday party.

Cooper said she read about Jafek-Jones’ work on Twitter and ordered a funeral arrangement when a friend of the family died.

“She was so sweet and interested, and went out of her way to make the arrangement really reflect this friend’s style AND to have fit my budget,” Cooper wrote in an e-mail to the NewsPress.

Jafek-Jones also made a peach and yellow arrangement for Cooper’s birthday party.

“I sent her a copy of the invitation (with all our colors) and a sample of an arrangement shape (kind of flowing and natural looking …) I liked on Flower Wild’s blog. I mentioned my favorite flower was the peony and my 2nd fav was ranunculus,” Cooper wrote. “And then she did the rest.”

Peonies are one of the most expensive cut flowers. The paper counterparts are more expensive too, Jafek-Jones said.

Easier flowers may take only an hour to make. An iris takes about three hours. Peonies take almost four hours for one bloom because each petal has a wire hidden in it that must be colored to match the paper.

“Peonies are one of the most expensive wedding flowers – $8 or $9 a stem. I thought Mother Nature must take her time with those too. If they are that expensive and hard to do, I can totally sympathize,” she said.

For now, Jafek-Jones, a fourth-generation Stillwater resident, will keep her full-time job as office manager for the Oklahoma Water Resource Research Institute on the Oklahoma State University campus, and continue to make flowers in evenings and on weekends.

Someday soon, she said she hopes her business will become her full-time job, and is exploring teaching tissue and crepe paper flower making at the Multi Art Center.