Monday, January 28, 2013

Handmade flower power

Hi everyone! I hope everyone's 2013 has started off fantastically! Or at least without incident. Well, let's try and get pumped up for 2013. WOOHOO, 2013!!! YEAH!

When I was shopping for Christmas presents (which was, like, forever ago), I found this pretty awesome book for a friend:

Myra Callan's Adornments, available on Amazon

When I bought it, I thumbed through it, and I liked it so much I bought it for myself. It teaches how to make your own fabric flowers (like the ones on the cover), and gives you many, many ideas on how to work fabric flowers into your own adornments. Of course, you don't have to do the exact projects that Myra lays out, and I personally like to use this book as an inspiration book and guide for my own ideas.

The instructions in the book are easy to follow and have lots of pictures (thank goodness). In fact, I think the instructions are easy to follow because there are so many pictures (thank goodness, again). The only difficult aspect of the book is that some sort of millinery or dapping set is recommended for making flowers (in order to make them "permanently" concave). Myra suggests a much cheaper "hot spoon" option for making flowers - unfortunately I haven't tried it yet and have no idea how effective this option is.

Fortunately, you can always buy your own flowers (duh!) AND the book cover's project does not even require a millinery or dapping set (phew). So I decided to give the book cover's project a try (yay)!
Spring in winter?
flower closeup!







I figured it would be a bit disingenuous for me to post a tutorial since I basically followed the instructions in Myra's book. That would probably be plagiarism. Probably.

I can, however, post some tips that I used in making my adornment that weren't in the book. First, the book cover's project was done on a hair comb (I think), and I did mine on a headband. I wrapped a metal headband frame in some blue ribbon (with a lot of glue at each end). To make the big white flower in the middle, I used a flower that I bought at JoAnn's, to which I added larger petal layers. The pink flower was also store-bought, as well as the sprig with lots of little white flowers - basically, I did very little flower-making. The leaves were, of course, also store bought, and everything came with stems that I wrapped onto the headband (with A LOT of glue). All in all, it was a pretty easy project and it came out well, don't you think?

Let me know if you like the headband and/or will be trying the DIY yourself! It's kind of nice to have a little spring bloom in your hair while it's still cold and wintery outside, I think!

Pretty rainbow!