Saturdays are for craft: Material Flowers

Saturdays are great.  We take Saturdays off from everything; college work, other work...  Actually that's not strictly true.  I have done some house work on a number of Saturdays.  Often Saturdays are washing day, and sometimes I clean the house on Saturdays too because I often don't want to use study-time as cleaning-time. 

This Saturday we did do a bit of work.  We had a working bee with the other college students who live around us.  We do odd jobs around our houses and in the gardens and common spaces.  J did a lot of mulch moving and I was involved with fixing up the sandpit.  After shovelling out all the sand we fixed up the lining on the bottom and then sifted all the sand back into the sandpit.  That’s right, sifted.  We strung up the sandpit cover (made of shade cloth material) using the poles of the shade cloth that covers the sandpit and filtered sand through it by swinging the cover back and forth. 

After the morning I didn't really feel like doing any other 'work' like hemming some pants or filling out psych application forms.  So I did some craft. 

I've been wanting to try out these flowers for a while, that I found on Pinterest.  I've now made two, and I decided to document the second one I made.  This was fun and satisfying.  I haven't done anything crafty in a while and It makes me think I really should do it more often. 

The details of how to make these flowers are here, but I did a few things differently so I thought I'd share how I did it.  The main difference was that I sewed mine, and while the tutorial does suggest this as an option, she used glue so I thought it would be worth showing how I made these flowers by sewing.  Glue is obviously faster than sewing, but I don't have a hot glue gun and I didn't want to have to hold and wait for runny glue to dry.  Plus, I find sewing relaxing in some way and I feel like I would have more control than with glue. 

You start with cutting out nine flower shapes from some t-shirt material.

 

Cut out a circle of felt in a similar colour (I didn’t have orange so I had to go with yellow).  Because it will be on the back it doesn’t really matter because it won’t show. 

 

Then you have to fold the flowers to make a ruffled or layer petal look.  Fold a flower in half, and then in half again. 

Then you attached the folded flower to the circle of felt.  I just stitched along the edges of the fold so that the petals could lift a bit (more on this later).

As I added folded flowers I continued with the same bit of thread, working along the folds. 

After this you add a second layer of folder flowers, but off-set from the first later by a 45 degree turn.  The picture should explain it. 

Here I've now completed two layers (though you can't really tell).  Sewing the second layer was tricky.  I didn't want to sew all the way through the bottom layer of petals (that's a lot of material to go through) so I tried to sew it onto the top flap of the petal.  This is a bit tricky but manageable.  The whole thing isn't as rigid as you might think so you can do a bit of bending to get the needle in underneath the petals you're sewing on. 

Now you make the central petals.  This bud is made by folding a flower in half (once, not twice this time) and rolling it up along the fold.  I rolled it so it was a bit of a cone shape, the pointy end being where the fold is. 

This bud then gets put into the middle of the petals you've sewed on so far.  I'll admit that at this stage, glue would have been far easier.  But soldier on! 

I didn't do this, but in hindsight it might be best to sew through the bottom of the bud to hold the whole thing together before sewing it onto the other petals.  Mine kept unrolling (a problem I didn't have with the first one, go figure) as I was trying to sew it in. 

Once you have it attached then comes the final stages in making this pile of petals look like an actual flower!

Sew the top layer of petals up onto the bud, as pictured below.  How much of this attaching you do is really up to you and your flower.  If it looks like there are gaps, or the petals need some fluffing up then attach some petals with a little stitch.  Glue might also be easier here, but I felt like I had more control with the stitches.

I also sewed the edges of the petals together from the back because I found that they were a bit flappy and left obvious gaps between them.  This isn't a necessary step, you decide what to do based on how yours turns out. 

There it is, the finished product!  I sewed a little loop on the back to put a bobby pin through so I could wear it in my hair.  You could also glue it onto a headband, hang it from a necklace or glue a brooch pin on the back. 

If you do make one, let me know how it goes!