Flowers!

This month, I spent a bit of time making felted flowers....from commercial acrylic felt to felted wool fabric.  It was a lot of fun...plus, it's given me a number of ideas for embellishing various

I found LOTS of fabulous instructions for these on the web, and attempted a few of them using the commercial acrylic felt.  These came out a bit better than the ones I did earlier this month.

For the top flower,   I cut out two layers of 5 petaled flowers and  stitched them together...filling the center with a button to finish it off.   I basically used the Classic Felt Flowers - Tutorial pattern for this, but decided to stitch the flowers together rather than glue them together.  The bottom two flowers were inspired by the Felt Daisy Tutorial and Pattern.    Instead of stuffing a bead inside the felt for the flower center, I rolled a rectangular strip of felt and stitched it together.   For the flower on the bottom left (above), I followed the basic pattern for the petals and rounded the edges of each petal for a softer look.   For the one on the right, I followed the same procedure, but left the petals squared off.   For both, I stitched them together on the underside rather than using glue.

The second type of flowers I made used 1 inch squares of felted fabric - it's a great way to use up bits of felted wool left over from rug hooking.  I ran into a bundle of felted squares of fabric at a resale shop and snapped them up.  They were just perfect for felted roses!





I pictured each of the 4 inch square blocks cut into one inch squares where they could be used as a single color or multiple colors to create felted roses.

The next step was to round the top two corners of each of the 1 inch square to make them look more "petal like".   I planned to make two flowers....one with a red center (components shown on the left) and one with a pink center (components shown on the right).    The layout on the right shows the basic layout for the center (4 petals) and the outer part of the rose (7 petals).

I stitched the 7 "outer petals" together...slightly overlapped about 1/4 inch from the bottom.  For the center, I stitched the four center petals together.....slightly overlapped as shown above....about 1/4 inch above the bottom.   I then roll the center and stitch the bottom to hold it in place.   Then, I rolled the "outer petals" around my center petals and stitch it together on the bottom - it forms a flat bottom when you roll the flower....perfect for adding a pin back or barrette to create a rose pin or barrette.

You can add leaves to the rose by simply cutting out a somewhat leaf-like shapes and attaching it to the bottom of the flower.   Below are the results.   I was quite please with how the flowers turned out (my photography....well, that's another story!!!