A weekend of stitchery

I have had a fun weekend with my sewing machine, my embellisher, fabric, fibres and dies. I had no idea where I was heading with this piece when I started stitching a few strips of scrap fabric together and am really quite pleased with how it turned out. The only thing that I really wanted to dabble with was some of my few fibres from my pile of purchases at the recent knitting & stitching show and my embellisher, other than that, stuff just kinda happened!!!

So having got a background, I decided that maybe some fabric flowers would be nice sitting on top of some fibre stems. I made the stems first, I cut lengths of different fibres and placed them on a strip of backing fabric, embellished the life out of them in my embellisher and stood back and admired them.....they looked fab!! For those of you who are unfamiliar with what an embellisher is, it looks like a sewing machine but it has 12 barbed needles. Just like needle felting, it will pierce all the layers with the barbed needles which pushes some of the top fibres to the back and kind of meshes them all together....very clever stuff!!!

Next came the flowers and this is where I got all excited. I have used my Paperartsy Grungeflower dies more than any other dies that I have. I have also die cut fabric with them before but I have not been able to make dimensional flowers without adding layers of scrunched up paper between the fabric layers. I can now and jolly pleased I am too!!

If you would like to have a go at making them, this is what you do.

These are the dies I used. The large flower is Grunge Flower1, the other flowers come in a set Grunge Flowers 2 & 3 and the leaf is the tiny leaf from the Scallop Flower set. They can all be seen here.

The first thing you need to do is choose some contrasting fabrics. Lightweight polycotton type fabrics are the best, nothing too thick, after all dies really are designed for just paper, it is us crafters who abuse them and try to cut anything and everything!!! Once you have your selection, you will need to iron some fusible interfacing stuff to the back of the fabric, this aids the cutting process and also prevents fraying of the fabric.

As you can see from the above picture, you do not need to be covering the fabric to the very edges with the fusible stuff, in fact I prefer not to as I always end up fused to my ironing board!!!!

Next, you need to take a needle and thread and stitch a running stitch from one side of the flower to the other, once at the other side of the flower, gather up the fabric slightly and secure with a few over stitches. Start between two petals and head for the gap directly opposite the starting point.

Repeat the running stitch for the remaining petals.

This is what you get.

Now you need to repeat the process for the other two flowers and you can layer them together and either secure with a brad or sew a button in place...the possibilities are endless!

I hope you like these flowers as much as I do, I can't wait to make some more!!

OK I'm off to watch the results of Strictly Come Dancing.
Lin