Flower Trials

I wanted to have flowers that opened and closed. Here are some of the things that I tried in order to accomplish this:

At first I thought that if I just had the flower material retract into the cone that it would spring back up when pushed out, but the material wanted to keep its form as it was inside the cone.

Next I tried to make it all out of the same strip of material so that it would pull the rest up as it was pushed out:

I did not like the corkscrew effect that this had. 

Next I tried making loops out of fishing line that would be tethered to the cone on one end and be attached to the wire on the other. This would make the "petals" expand as the wire was pushed up:

This was not successful as the material did not fit down into the tube. 

The final thing I tried was again with the fishing line. I simply tethered four pieces of fishing line to the copper wire so that they would push up as the wire pushed up. The line has a natural curve caused by the spool it came on:

I tried six strings at first, but then it had trouble fitting down the tube, so I went down to only four.

My plan was to attach a sort of webbing to these so that it would pull in and out as the fishing line moved in and out.