Friday, July 20, 2012

Easy Fabric Flowers Tutorial

DIY Fabric Flowers
gathered fabric flower tutorial





Fabric flowers are a great way to embellish woman's clothing. you can usually whip them up quickly, easily and from your scraps box ( don't tell me you don't have one! Everyone sewist has them)
There are dozens of ways to make them, here's one of the ways I use to make flowers. I'm sharing here because I haven't seen any other tutorial using this method. If you have already known about it or don't need it, feel free to skip.

Materials:

Knit scraps
Matching thread
Needle for hand sewing ( optional)

Construction:

cutting a fabric strip for sewing flowers

cutting a fabric strip for sewing flowers


1. Cut a knit strip 3 inches X 15 inches. This will make pretty big flowers of about 5 inches diameter. These are fine for adult clothing, but if you're sewing for kids keep the strip width between 1.5 inches - 2 inches.

gathering a knit fabric strip
2. Set your stitch length to longest and sew a seam along one longer side .

sewing a flower fabric
3. Pull the bobbin thread to gather the fabric tightly.  It will take the circular shape.

sewing two small sides
4. Sew the shorter sides with right sides together.

embellishing with fabric flowers
5. You can see that there is a ruffle in the center of the flower. Now place the flower wherever you want to sew it and sew a seam all around the ruffle in the center. The flower is actually ready at this point but below are a few optional steps and I tell you why I prefer to do them.

fabric flowers after laundary
6. What I found is that if you leave the flowers after step 5, they will get crumpled in wash and then you have to iron them to get them back in the right shape. So I used the following method to keep them blooming.


sewing small tacks along the flower edge
7. Thread a needle with matching thread and sew small tacks along the circumference of the flowers.

embellishing with a fabric flower - inside seams
Here's how it looked on the inside.

embellishing with a flower

8. Enjoy the flower!

Here's a pointer to other kinds of flowers, just in case this one is not your type.

sewing poppy fields dress
Not sure where to use these flowers? I think I can show you a couple of ways..wink, wink.



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1 comment:

  1. Lovely flowers!

    Just stopped by to let you know that I featured your reversible dress pattern and tutorial on my round tuit post this week!
    Round Tuit 111
    Thanks again for linking up! Hope you have a great week!
    Jill @ Creating my way to Success

    ReplyDelete

Leave some sugar :)