Cloth Flower Bouquet

We're hosting another Japanese student this year! Sometime last week I was thinking about gifts to buy or make for our student, and I thought a bouquet of flowers would be nice. But I wanted to sew her something, so I decided to sew them instead of buy fresh ones.

I started with this little cute baby hung around while I gathered my supplies. When she went down for her nap, I kicked it into high gear. 

Last year I bought green canvas to make a pillow for my sister, but canvas is really stiff and hard to work with, so it wasn't right for a pillow. It is perfect for flower stems, though!

1. Stems

Cut the canvas in strips that are 1'' in width. The length is however long you want your flowers to be.  Fold the edges in twice, like this:

 Pin together. I also cut leaves out of green fleece that I stuck into the seam before sewing it together.

Sew it down! 

 2. Petals

For petals, I scrounged up cute fabric remains from other projects. Most of the petals are from leftover satin-like fabric from when I made shirts for my sisters for Christmas. Each petal is about two inches wide and three inches long. Sew a curve around the top like it was a finger puppet. Trim around the curve and flip it right side out. This picture shows the progression from top to bottom.

Take five or six petals, fold one corner of each over, and arrange in a flower shape. Hand sew an anchor in the middle of the petals to keep them all together while you sew on the flower center.

The flower center is sewn like an applique. The first one I sewed with a tissue paper circle on the BACK side of the flower, and the material on the front side. I sewed along my tissue paper circle, then ripped off the paper afterwards. The subsequent flowers, I just sewed a little circle without the tissue paper as a guide.

Trim the excess fabric 

Voila! A flower! Repeat to make as many flowers as you want. 

 3. Attaching the petals to the stem!

Roll the top of the stem into a little disk (see below). 

Hot glue the disk onto the back of the flower. I also added a little dot of hot glue to the top of the stem to keep it flat agains the back of the flower.

To make your flowers stand stiffly, insert a bamboo skewer into the stem. Shimmy it to the top of the flower. 

Repeat with each flower, and you've got a whole bouquet!

This was a fun nap time sewing project. We pick up our student tomorrow. I can't wait to give her these cute little flowers that won't die after a week!