Felt: Flowers

Hello all! So sorry - it's been too long since I updated, but I hope it's forgivable since we were moving! Yes, the past two weeks have been an absolute tornado of moving trucks, storage spaces, hotels, driving, and lots of other fun things like that as Collin and I transitioned from Atlanta to Savannah for baseball season! This year, Collin is playing for the Mets class A affiliate in Savannah - the Sand Gnats. Actually, the team is pretty stacked with quality players, so you should come down and visit since I'm pretty sure this is going to be an impressive season!



Not to say that moving has stopped me from working - it absolutely has not! It just stopped me from having hours on end to take and edit pictures. And it stopped me from having a working internet connection until today. But now I have lots of time to get everyone caught up on what I've been working on. Today, I'll start with a subject I wanted to approach months ago - FELT!

I have decided that a frequent guest on the pages of this blog will be the world's most versatile material: Felt. Felt is awesome. You find it everywhere. You can literally dream up anything and make it out of felt. And you can MAKE felt yourself! Quintessential craft. My first post in honor of felt will be about another fan favorite: flowers.

Around Valentine's Day, there was a post on my most favorite Purl Bee about felt roses to make little barrettes. I had some leftover felt from my school days at UGA, so I made a little rose hairpiece for myself. It was so fast and easy, I knew making these roses would be a valuable skill...



Not long afterwards, I was called upon to put together the floral arrangements for Collin's grandmother's birthday. I tried to figure out which option would be the most cost-efficient, I called around to several florists... even a small bundle of stems will cost a bundle of money. Then, I realized I had at least $30 in gift cards to Hobby Lobby. You know what that means - craft time.

Hobby Lobby has a huge selection of "felt," I call it this because it's made of acrylic and not wool or else it wouldn't be 25 cents a sheet. Either way, it gets the job done. I ended up buying 80 sheets of felt and a pack of wire floral stems.. I think 50 of them were $1.99? This was enough material to make 160 felt roses! Did I actually make 160 of them in the week's time I had before the event? Of course not. I made about 50 (I do have a day job...), but it was fun and made some pretty beautiful flowers!



I cut out all the pieces outlined in the Purl Bee's tutorial of how to make the roses (except the clip-cover), and I added a 12" length of stem wire, since I wanted to make bouquets and not barrettes. The only thing I did differently was that I hooked the stem wire around one end of the long center piece of felt so that when I rolled the flower up, the stem wire was attached to the interior. I then used a seam ripper to poke holes in the center of the two petal pieces and ran the wire through those pieces as I sewed them together, so that the rose would be firmly secured to the stem.





Once I felt accomplished at making felt roses, I decided that I wanted to try and change it up. As much as I love working on projects from other blogs, I want to bring something new to the table as well! Collin had just surprised me with hydrangeas a few days before, so I sat at the dinner table, studying how God put those little flowers together and how I could replicate it in fabric. I made lots of little blossoms and then attached them to a pretty-blue headband to make my own floral headpiece.





Overall, I had fun trying to make lots of different kinds of flowers... I tried tulips and lilies and things like that, but I haven't quite worked out all the kinks yet. The roses and hydrangeas are a great start though - very pretty and useful!