I love breathing new life into supplies (like a small mountain of fabric) that I already own. If you're not familiar with Greencraft Magazine by Stampington and Company, it's a wonderful source of inspiration for reinventing all kinds of things. The Winter 2018 issue just arrived in my local bookstore and somehow it found its way home to my studio. I have no idea how that happened!
According to the cover, this issue of Greencraft is filled with “45+ Stylish and Sustainable Projects”. When you watch the video, you'll see a quick flip through the magazine to give you the flavor of the projects within. I was particularly inspired by the Fabric Corsages on pages 26-29. Perhaps I'm always attracted to corsages because I remember the way my dad always made real flower corsages for my mom, me and my sisters for special occasions. Just thinking about them elicits the aroma of the flower headbands he like to create for us, too. Let me tell you, we thought we were very stylish back then in spite of the fact that they caused major headaches. 😉
During this episode of Drama-free Friday, I began with a pile of fabrics and recycled denim. Because I've worked with fabric for a long time, I have a wide variety of different types and fibers to choose from. I selected heavier fabrics like printed Duck Cloth along with denim.
Each flower corsage is are created with three circles. To easily draw the circles, I used the Westcott Jumbo Circles Template. It's created in a durable plastic and contains 13 sizes of circles. I cut each circle from recycled denim and also another colorful fabric.
Next, I used my sewing machine set up for free-motion embroidery along with various machine embroidery threads to add details to each circle. If you're not confident with your free-motion skills, please be careful when you do this stitching step! The pieces are small! I backed each colored circle with denim before stitching.
I used felt (my preference is Wool-Blend felt) to create 2 leaves per corsage. The first leaves I made were 2 layers of felt, but I decided that was a waste of good felt. All the rest of the leaves are backed with denim which worked great. The flower layers are stitched together with a center bar tack and the leaves are glued with Aleene's Tacky Glue between the bottom 2 layers of circles.
To complete each corsage, I threaded Perle Cotton through a button and tied it on the back. A bit of Tacky Glue attaches the button to the flower and the Perle Cotton makes it appear that the button is stitched in place without trying to stitch through all the thick layers. To complete the corsage, I hand stitched a Bar Pin on the back of the flower.
Click the image below to see all the details.
Be sure to join me for the next episode of Drama-free Friday which will be the first Friday of December at 2pm Eastern.
Until then ~
Remember to Get Creative today! It's Easy!!
Barb
