Wednesday, March 17, 2010

flower balls

Back in January, I made some fabric flowers. I won't post a full tutorial: I used one found on OnceWed and it does a nice job of explaining the super easy process!

For each color, I bought a half yard of cotton fabric, plus a half yard of chiffon because I was in a daring mood. This produced 110 flowers. I also varied the size by using both the spool, suggested by the tutorial, and the bottom of a glass. You can easily make bigger ones than that too. For the chiffon, which turns out to be evil, I had to cut large squares because I could not trace circles onto the fabric.

It is definitely time consuming, so I recommend using an assembly line approach. I enlisted Kirk and we spread the project out over several days, doing one color each day. I'd say it took over two hours to cut and sew a half yard, with both of us working simultaneously. Kirk took a bit of a shortcut and folded the fabric twice when he was tracing circles, producing four circles at a time instead of two. But seriously, it's so mindless. You'll become an expert at threading a needle and tying knots in no time -- because that's the most challenging part of this project.

If you have a ton of patience and perhaps an entire TV series to watch, these are great. I love that it's a way to completely incorporate the color scheme and a little girly. Now, how do I use these in my wedding? At first I wanted to do the garland thing, but I wasn't sure where to hang them without being forced to make even more flowers -- like the railing at the reception hall would need way more flowers. I'm ambitious but not THAT ambitious.

Then recently I had a duh moment. I have a giant candy jar that's too big for candy and a bunch of fabric flowers. I'm not yet convinced it looks good, but maybe it'll grow on me.


The entire cost was about $30 for a total of 2.5 yards of fabric. I didn't buy sale fabrics, so you could certainly cut costs there. I've ended up with over 100 flowers though!

Did you embark on a DIY journey with no clear use or application? How did you end up using your creation?

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