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Thursday, September 23, 2010

Fabric Flowers - Tutorial


I'm back with a simple fabric flower tutorial!  I found several tutorials online, but decided to simplify the process since I'll be making many, many, many... of these little lovelies.  I've been busy cranking them out while catching up on Glee.  I think all that fantastic music helps speed up the process!

Step 1 
Choose a fabric.  For some of the flowers I used the 4x6  muslin bag that Anthropologie uses to package their receipts.  I also purchased some muslin and cotton fabric from Joanns.  If you use a regular fabric, make sure both sides of the material are presentable.

Step 2
Cut the material. I'm all about shortcuts, so I cut the bag in half and folded it into thirds so that I could get 6 circles out of one cut.

Step 3
Cut out your circles. The circles do not need to be perfect, so I free-handed a circle using my pinking shears.  You don't have to use pinking shears, a smooth cut gives the flower a completely different look.

These circles are about 1.5 inches in diameter

Step 4
Take one circle and fold it in half, then fold it in half again. It should be in the shape of a slice of pie.

Step 5
Put a couple of stitches into the bottom of the "pie shape".  But don't knot it off yet...

Step 6
Fold more circles and add it to the stack.  Make sure to put a couple of stitches into the bottom of each "pie shape".

Keep adding those folded circles until you have 6 "pie shapes" stitched together. 
If you have larger circles, you may want to add more petals so that the flower is full and not floppy.

Step 7
Then run the thread a final time through the entire stack of folded circles, stitch it together & knot it off. Cut the thread!

Step 8
Fluff out the petals...

and wah-lah... Fabric Flowers!


And what do you do with all these flowers?  First of all, I'm going to glue them on these pins so that they can be used and reused again and again.

They'd be pretty on place cards:

They'd add a pretty little detail to a simple napkin:

And they sure do gussy-up this plain shirt... is gussy-up a real word?:


[See here for another fabric flower tutorial]

 
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