How to To Make a Fabric Flower
Fabric flowers can look as vivid and real as natural flowers. Furthermore, they last forever. Most fabric flower patterns are easy and fun to make and require no machine sewing. Using solid or patterned textile squares for petals -- along with sparkling accents -- fabric flowers can be made to imitate the shapes and colors of flowers found in the natural world. More sophisticated projects can be crafted with unusual combinations composed of colors and patterns that startle the eye. Fabric flowers are beautiful on their own, and they also make wonderful embellishments to clothing and accessories.
Instructions
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Choose your fabric and decide on a color palette. Gather together squares of fabric approximately 3-inches square. You can use scraps from previous sewing projects or cut squares from a length of cloth.
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2
Choose six squares and round off their edges with scissors so that the squares are circular. You can also cut out circles from larger pieces of fabric by using a round object as a pattern. The pieces should be exactly the same size.
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Fold the circles in half. Fold them again into quarters. The pieces should be triangular in shape with one open end on each piece.
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Use a needle and thread and make a "long stitch" along the open edge. A long stitch is just a loose, wide stitch that allows the fabric to be pushed together into "gathers," or bumps. Just begin stitching, leaving very wide spaces in between the stitches. The stitches should allow the fabric to move. Do this with all of the folded pieces so that they are attached to each other in a circle shape with a center hole.
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Bunch the petals together to make the center hole as small as you wish. This will create ridges at the edges of the fabric pieces. Doing this will also make the fabric look more like petals.
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Cut an additional piece of fabric the same size as the center hole. Attach this piece by sewing it with a regular stitch along the gathered open ends of the petals until the hole is covered. This anchors the petals and creates a base for the center decoration.
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Sew buttons or beads, in a pattern of your choosing, onto the center piece of fabric. You can use one large button or many small buttons and beads in any shape or color you wish.
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Tips & Warnings
This is only one type of basic fabric flower pattern. Many other, more complex, patterns can be found using the Resources section. As you learn the basic pattern, you can use more petals -- or petals of different sizes -- to create variety.
References
Resources
- Photo Credit Hemera Technologies/PhotoObjects.net/Getty Images
