Fabric Flower Hair Clip

Woot!  I'm doing something different!  I'm sure y'all have gotten a little bored reading card tutorial after card tutorial.  Funny thing is, when I started making this flower, I thought I was making it for a card, but nooo, that didn't work out!  I'm quite glad though.  Truth be told, this will look like a card making tutorial until the hair clip comes in.  Hehe, I'm sorry.  I can't help it.

A few years ago, I had an out of state friend come over for a few days, and one of the things we did was make cards.  That is, we planned on making cards. I don't remember if she got any made, but I know I didn't.  Instead I paced around trying to think of a card idea, and finally I came up with the idea to fold a long piece of fabric in half and sew it together at the bottom, and make a rose out of it, and then use it on a card.  I folded the fabric and sewed it together at the bottom, but I wasn't quite sure exactly how to make it into a rose, even though I sort of knew in theory how I was going to do it.  So that long piece of fabric stayed on my chair or on my desk or really, it's probably been many places in the vicinity of my room.

I've been preparing to do a series on using scraps, which has encouraged me to use up some of my scraps.  So, on the spur of the moment, I decided to finally make that rose!  I always thought I would do it on some brown paper, or more likely, thin cardboard, which is sort of brownish.  But I also had this large piece of teal paper lying around (it had only been lying around for less than a week, but still), and it seemed to match the fabric, so I decided to go ahead and use it!

I may not have explained very well when I said I sewed it at the bottom.  Maybe this picture helps?  If it doesn't examine below peektor. 

You can see that the piece of fabric is duper long.  It's probably around 18 inches, but I can't be sure.  I should've measured it before I glued it on.  Which is what I'm doing in this picture.  Or what I did already.  In this picture.

I did not mention it above, but you should use hot glue to adhere the fabric.  It dries much quicker than any other kind of glue, and it will hold it better.

It's really important to have a toothpick to press down the fabric, because you can't do it with your fingers because of the hot glue.  Continue twisting the fabric around while gluing down until you get to the end.

Here it looks like a rose.  Like it's suppose to.

But here...it looks like a cake.  That is not what we're going for.

At this point I didn't know exactly what I was going to do about the cake-lookage, but I decided to cut out the flower anyway.  I used my super fancy super sharp scissors so that I could cut through the glue.

I ended up cutting the top off, so it was shorter and not so cake-like.

I ironed the part that I cut off, so it didn't have the fold in the middle.

...And then made folds and glued on to the edge.  I made sure to glue it on so it sort of went out sideways instead of straight up.  I wouldn't have been able to do that if I hadn't cut it out.  I don't know if it was because of the ironing, or just the kind of fabric, but it stayed when I put creases in with my fingers.

There, that's pretty.

Ah, it looks so much better on the side.

Hot glue a hair clip onto the back.

Look what I done made!

Glitter Flowers II

If you read my last post, you might recognize the glitter paper in this card.  I used left-overs again!  (I'm always so proud when I do that.)  Hence the title of this post.

First, I went around the edges with my hot pink sharpie.  As always with things like this, I didn't measure.  That would just be unnecessary work.  Easy work, but it's still work!  Okay, well, I honestly can't classify that as work...but I digress.

I was suppose to write "thank you," but somehow my hand got away from my brain for a moment, and before I knew it, I had put an S on the end of "thank"!  So I had to add something else on.  Otherwise it wouldn't look right all the way up there in the corner all by itself.

I have a little cylinder of buttons in one of my boxen (teehee; only some of y'all will get that) under my bed.  Many of those buttons are these white pearly buttons, which I used here.

*Awed little kid voice*  Ooooh, pretty.

String the string through the holes of the button and tie a nice perty bow.

When you get the placement of the flowers as you like it, stretch a piece of string from the bottom of the card to the bottom of one of the flowers and cut.

Lay down a thin line of glue where the string will go.

These are for leaves.  They're about an inch long.

To do the leaves, put a small dot of glue on one side of the bottom of one stem, and then bend a leaf string in half and stick on, and repeat for other side.  You may have to twist the string a bit so that it doesn't fray.

This card was super easy to make, especially since I already had pieces to work with.  I'm hoping to do a post or series of posts soon about using scraps!  It will be a learning experience for me, if no one else, as I rarely use scraps.

Glitter Flowers

Unlike a certain sister of mine, I do not really care for glitter.  However, I received some glittery paper for Christmas, and I am not one to waste good paper.  What I especially liked about this paper was that all the glitter stayed on the paper, and did not get all over my hands and everything else in the vicinity!  I'm used to glitter getting everywhere when it's used, so I was quite pleased that this did not do that.  Because of that, I actually kind of like the way this paper looks with the glitter.

This will be used for the background.  I wanted something out of the ordinary (as in, something other than a pretty blue sky), and I really like the way this looks behind the vellum in the finished piece.

This is for the bigger of the two flowers, which we are about to make.

If I had differently sized scallop circle punches, I would use them.  I could even buy some!  (What a novel idea!)  But I rarely buy things, and isn't it so much easier to simply find something round and trace around it, cut it out, and then cut around it with the squiggly cut on your paper cutter, even though it won't make a scallop circle, it will instead make a squiggly edged circle, and therefore won't look as good as a scallop circle?

Well, no, that might not be easier, but that's what I did.  I'm not going to go to the trouble of driving to a craft store just to buy something like that.  Well maybe I would.  But I haven't.  ANYWAY, this picture is the circle after I cut it out.

This is the squiggly blade on my paper cutter.  I don't use it very often, but it's always fun when I do.  That really isn't saying much, though.  I usually enjoy whatever card-making tools I use while making cards.

I decided to test it on a scrap piece before I went around the real thing.  As you can see, it didn't work all that well, but I thought I would be able to make it right for the glitter piece.

The blade didn't cut all the way through, so I had to go around it with my knife.

...Which is what I'm doing here.

Unfortunately it didn't work even the second time.  But hey!  Who says it has to be perfect?!  Me.  I said it has to be perfect.  Oh well.  I will survive.  Oh as long as I know how to love I know I'll stay alive.  I will survive.

There, that one's better.  Actually I trimmed the edge a little so it was the right shape.

It took me a little while to find something the right size to trace around for the vellum center of the smaller flower but I finally settled on the cap of my extra fancy stainless steel sharpie.  It's bigger than the other sharpie caps.

I went around it with pencil, then cut out.

Here are both glitter pieces with both vellum centers.  The diameter of the bigger center is about an inch.

Punch a hole in the center of each flower with eyelet punch.

You may not be able to tell here, but the eyelet on the left in this picture has not been punched out at all yet, while the one on the right has been punched out, just once.  To do the string part, as we will in the next steps, you need to punch it out once, like the right eyelet is.  As you, hopefully, can see, that one spreads out a little at the top, while the left one goes inward.  That way, you can wrap the string around it with out it coming out of the hole.

These are left over from my last post.  They're all different lengths, ranging from, like, 3 inches, to around 5 probably.

I found that it's easiest to get tie it onto the eyelet if you first loosely tie it like this, and then sort of hook it on.

See how there's space to hook it on?

Pull down...

...And tie tightly.

I used a longer piece for the bigger flower, and a shorter piece for the smaller flower.

This has been in the background of some of the earlier pictures, but we didn't need it until now, so that's why I'm just now introducing it.  In the card from my last post, I was originally going to overlay the patterned paper with this piece of vellum, which is the exact same size as that piece was.  I decided not to do that, however, so I'm using the vellum for this instead.

This picture is simply to show you how we're going to layer ever'thin'.

Ahh, looking at that "thanks" makes me happy.  So uniform and perty.  I did those leafy things with a pale green sharpie.  They make me happy too.

OOH!  Colored staples!  Have you ever heard of such a thing?!  I hadn't heard of them, but I recently-ish I was thinking about them for some reason, and I thought to myself, "Hmm!  I bet those things exist!"  And so they do!

I went around the edges, doing three staples on the bottom and top, and five on the left and right.

I've had experience with two kinds of staplers - the kind that makes the staples flat on the back, and the kind that makes them stick up in the back.  I have the latter, as you can see.  Because of that, the paper wouldn't lay down flat when I put the glue on.

Soo...with my corner rounder, I sort of hammered them all down.  It took a while and was kind of difficult...and frustrating, so hopefully you have the other kind of stapler.

After I flattened the backs of the staples, I decided the paper was too...not porous enough for the glue to really work, so I put it through my sticker maker.

This is what it looks like after going through the sticker maker.

There - now it's all nice and flat.

I also put the flowers through the sticker maker, since, of course, they were made of the same paper, so glue wouldn't work on them either.  Because the strings hang over the edge, I tucked them under the vellum while they went through the sticker maker.  That way they didn't get sticky stuff on them unnecessarily.