Fabric Flower Tutorial

I love the look of fabric flowers, especially white ones.  I have seen them everywhere and finally decided to try my hand at some.  I think that I might use them on a pillow but until then, thought a quick tutorial was the way to go.

I made a quick 3 part pattern for the flower petals.  I folded the paper in half to make sure that both sides were the same on my pattern.

Attach the pattern to your fabric and cut out 8 of each size petal.

First I cut out the largest of the petals.  When I had cut eight of those, I cut off the largest petal to get the pattern piece for the second petal.  Then I repeated this for the smallest petal.

Once I had all the petals cut out, I quickly layered them one on top of another so I had all eight petals in a row.  

Without backstitching over the ends, continuously feed the petals through the sewing machine so that they are all attached together.  My petals weren't perfectly lined up and that is ok because they just get scrunched up in the next step anyways.  Make sure to leave long threads on each end of the 8 petals.  

Take the top thread of one end of the petal chain and pull slowly and carefully.  Gently scrunch the petals down the thread until you are happy with how they are bunched together.  I worked from both ends of the chain using only the top thread.

I overlapped the petals a little to form a full flower.  While I used 8 petals, six probably would have done the job just as well.  

And this is what it looks like after you have pulled it all together and sewn the bottom to keep it together:

I also quickly made up a couple of two layered petaled flowers that were smaller in size.  I cut these free hand without a pattern purposefully getting petals of varying sizes.  For these smaller flowers, I used six petals.

You can see that they aren't perfect but that is ok ... you will be scrunching them up against one another and you'll never see the imperfections.

Of course I had to whip up a couple of rosettes after I learned how easy they were (see the simple technique I outline HERE) when making my Drop Cloth Rosette pillow.  This time however, I omitted the glue and stitched them underneath instead because I was worried about the glue showing through the light material.

While I am also a romantic at heart, I think if I do too many more floral projects their might be a little bit of backlash here ... being the only girl with four guys around :o)  I'll have to make something a little more tailored next time and I have the perfect idea in mind ....