Bloomin' in the snow

For the past week, I've been looking out the window to this every morning:

So it's been a great thing that my materials for making the fabric flowers arrived on Monday! We slid down to the post office and I dived right in... and so far, I have about 15 flowers to show for it. It doesn't sound like a lot, but I'm a slow worker when it comes to craft stuff, and I gotta say... I think they're going to be totally worth the work. Johnny and Mom have both been impressed so far, which has gone a long way to erase any doubts of "oh my gosh, can I actually make them look good?" that have crept up so far.

I've been working on white peonies and sparkly pink things that were supposed to be roses but look more like fluffy carnations. I have some other patterns and methods in mind for the two shades of taupe fabric that I still haven't tried yet, but here's what I've made with the first two.

"Peonies" (sorta):

First, I made a pattern (check out my awesome bedspread, btw).

Next, I doubled my white fabric over until I had four layers, and traced around the pattern.

Then I cut 'em out until I had a big stack of these beauties.

Now it's time to play with fire! I singed the edges of the fabric to keep it from unraveling (which is why all the fabrics I'm using are poly blends or straight-up synthetic -- cotton and linen don't play well with fire. Plus, the singed edge gives it a little depth, which I like.

Then you end up with a lot of these.

Stack four of 'em together and throw in a couple of stitches to keep the shape the way you want it, and you get...

(Apologies for skipping to the end on this one... I was watching a lot of Bones while stitching these together and got too wrapped up with the Gormogon vault stuff to remember to take pics.)

Roses/Carnations/Rosenations/"flowers":

First, cut a loooooong strip (about 3" wide) from the end of your fabric (probably about 45" in length - trim the edges off, if there's selvage on the ends):

Then wrap the fabric around your fingers like so, and pin it together.

Cut a rounded petal shape into one edge of your fabric roll.

Aaaaaand it's time to burninate! Toast the strip around all edges (i.e. straight side and curvy side -- and this fabric melts super-fast).

Start rolling up your strip and stitching it together at the bottom, arranging the petals and holding them in place with your fingers as you go to achieve the shape you desire. (This is the hard part -- I tried running a basting stitch along the bottom and just rolling it up, but that didn't really work with this particular type of fabric. And, thus, my fingers and hands are super-hurty from holding petals in place, but it's worth it).

(Yeah, it looks like a sparkly pink wad right now, buuuut...)

Ta-da! You have yourself a pink sparkly flower of some sort. They don't look exactly how I thought they'd look, but I still really like them -- I was worried that they'd be overpoweringly sparkly, but I think they'll look great with the plain linen and muslin looks of my others.

I'm pretty happy with my work so far, and I love seeing the pile of flowers in my Giant Tupperware Box 'O Wedding growing bigger every day. I'll give more step-by-steps of the other flower designs I come up with and of the process of attaching the blooms to the wire stems. Woo!