Fabric Flowers

I tried to think of something simple to post today since I probably won't get to post much during the week and decided to do some fabric flowers. I actually was really ambitious last night and cut all the pieces out, now I just need to stitch them together (ugh). A little background on me and the fabric arts, I may like them but they certainly don't like me! My grandmother was a fantastic seamstress! She could whip things up without a pattern and every year my Barbies always got a box of new clothes from Granny.

 Sadly, this amazing trait skipped my mom; the story of my brothers' jackets that almost sent her over the edge is a legend. I guess Granny thought she might have better luck with me because sometime around my freshman year in college I got an unsolicited sewing machine for Christmas.

Don't get me wrong, it was a great present and I still have it and (try to) use it, but I think she gave up on her dream of passing on her pinking shears to someone deserving when we spent a good chunk of that Christmas vacation working on a vest together. Over the years, I've pulled out the sewing machine from time to time for little projects but this past October I decided I would put my nose to the grindstone and make my Halloween costume. It was a fairly simple pattern and I didn't think I did too bad of a job, but apparently Granny did. She passed away that week and was buried on Halloween thus saving me from embarassing her with my terrible sewing skills. HA!

Well the long ramble was to get me to the point of today's project. Just because I don't sew well doesn't mean I don't love fabrics and patterns and am incredibly envious of people who do so well. So I'm thrilled when a sewing project comes up that requires very little stitchery, and in fact the worse the stitching the better the project looks! I got my pattern and instructions from the Wise Craft blog.
Now for the fabrics... I saw one of these pins in an antique/variety store (Queen of Hearts in Suwanee - awesome place!) a couple of weeks ago and thought they would be great to make. Most of the ones I saw looked to be made of upholstery fabric and I've been trying to figure out where I could get some on the cheap. I happened to walk into my JoAnns two weeks ago and there they were! They were selling the swatches of their discontinued home decor fabrics for $1 a swatch (and I can probably get 4 or 5 from each swatch)! I tried not to go crazy and narrowed down my choices to 8 swatches that I thought would be good colors for the summer and brought them home. They've been sitting in a bag on the floor of my craft room since then...

I did whip one up Wednesday night as a test and it was fairly simple, so I decided to do one of each swatch today.

I don't have a jar of buttons like most people, but rather a drawer of buttons. It's a shallow drawer in some odd Ikea piece of furniture meant for jewelry and lacy things, but the top drawer is reserved for buttons.

These pins would be really cool if I had some vintage buttons to put on them, but alas I think the oldest one I have is about 18 years old (that's close to vintage!) and was salvaged from one of my favorite rayon shirts (do they still make rayon?). Anyway, I chose some of the funkier ones and voila! Here are my fabric flowers.

(before stitching them together)

I stitched a pin back on each of these, but they could easily be used as pendants... if you like fraying fabric ends tickling your neck. I thought about using some fray stop on the ends, but that takes away from the shabbyness of them. Hope you enjoy - they'll be on my Etsy site soon!

I may get a post or two in this week, but my next big project will be on Steampunk Saturday!!!