day four: five petal fabric flowers

my version of fabric flowers from circles!

day four and we are set to make fabric flowers from circles.  the inspiration comes from my gift wrapping and gift ideas board on pinterest from bete bazzi's flickr photos. the photo does a fantastic job of showing how to create these little gems.

material and fiskars circle template

while the kids were having their morning tea, and as their maths was all sorted for after morning tea, i though i'd make good use of my time and cut out some circles for the flowers. i used my fiskars circle template to trace some circles onto the material. well ... i cut out my five circles, folded them, and put a gathering stitch through them, 12 minutes later and i had the most beautiful flower!  i still had time before i started the kids off with their maths, so i used a different size to make another one, and 10 minutes later i had another little gem!

the assortment of flower centres i found

ok, then i had to take a break and give my kids some mathematical teaching!  lunch came and instead of eating, i made flowers of all different sizes, found some great centres for the flowers from my scrapbooking stash, and also started layering different sized flowers together with hot glue to make bulkier ones. if you don't have a fiskars circle template, fear not, just use a glass or a jar and trace round that :)

it should be noted my muscles were not big enough or the fabric i used was too thick to have no gap in the middle, so thats why i have used centres on all my flowers, but actually i really like the look of them. i originally thought these would be fantastic for attaching to gifts, but the options for these flowers are endless!

i couldn't help it, i had to put one on a gift!

what you need to know:

• i doubled my cotton for the gathering stitch so i could pull it harder and not risk breaking the thread, 
• all the centre's were hot glued on including the brads, a great place to this type of craft supplies is scrapbook.com
• all were sewn with white thread, after the first one i realised you couldn't see the cotton at all so there was no need to change thread to match the fabric
• i plan to use some of these flowers on pollyanna's plain t'shirts, for those ones i will use embroidery thread for the gathering stitch and use sewn in buttons for the flower centres so the flowers don't fall apart in the wash!

outcome: its like heaven for crafty people and you don't even need skills or machinery. the options for these little beauties are endless, bunched together on top of a present, layered for cards, hot glued to headbands, scrapbook layouts, clothing accents, all of the above and more :) the are easy, quick, timeless, and versatile ... seriously, i could not want anything more!

thank you bete bazzi's for a great visual explanation of these fabulous little flowers, it was awesome and so are they!