Our Hopeful Home: Fabric Flower Necklace Tutorial {Part I}

We’ve all been inundated lately with how-to’s for making fabric flowers ~ all the rage in the jewelry world and in other crafty worlds as well. It seems I’ve come across TONS of tutorials for fabric flowers EVERYWHERE. I’m easily confused, so………I’ve taken it upon myself to create a mash-up of some other blogger tutorials on the subject and here’s what I came up with:

Part I of II : Organza Flower Necklace Tutorial.

Materials:
Organza fabric (Jo-Ann’s)
Needle and thread
Small pearls or other beads for decoration
Butane lighter
Pearl necklace (either handmade or store-bought)
Jump rings (Michaels)
Assorted round items to use for petal templates (explained below)

You’ll want to start out with some sort of templates (I’m not good at winging it as suggested by some craft divas) so I used a cardboard paper towel roll, a jelly jar and the (inverted) lid of a small Yankee Candle jar. If you want an even smaller (4th) petal, a Children’s Tylenol bottle cap will do (I KNOW they’ve been recalled!) The more circles, the “fluffier” the flower. And they do NOT have to be perfect! Here they are after cutting them out.

Time to get serious with some fire. (Sorry about the really old cookie tray ~ not so pretty, eh?)

Once you have your circles cut out you need to burn (yes, I said BURN) the edges of the flowers so they won’t fray (and so they look more like real flowers). I WAS REALLY AFRAID TO DO THIS. After attempting it, I can say without hesitation: “Do not be afraid!” In other words, if I can do it, anybody can :) Just go SLOWLY, and hold the lighter near the edge of the flower (I said NEAR the edge, NOT TOUCHING IT). You’ll start to see the edge curl up as you go around it. Tip: If you’re making more than one flower at a time you can fold the organza material in half (or as many times as you need) and cut out duplicate circles for each size all at one time. Mine looked like this.

Now you can play around with your embellishments, i.e., small pearls or other beads, and see how you want the final product to look. I chose pearls.

Place your “burned” petals one inside the other. Then add pearls or other embellishments as you desire. Sew, starting from underneath the bottom petal and go up through them all, including the pearls. I found it easier to do it all at once. NOTE TO SELF: BEFORE SEWING, MAKE SURE THE NEEDLE IS SMALL ENOUGH TO MAKE IT THROUGH THE HOLE IN THE PEARL!

I chose to make my own pearl necklace (a tutorial on that is in the works) but you can just as easily attach the flowers to a store-bought necklace or a necklace you already have that might need a little sprucing up! Finally, I attached the flowers onto the necklace by sewing a closed jump ring onto the back of each flower, then attaching that to the necklace with yet another (open this time) jump ring.

I was pretty happy with what I came up with!

I’ll ~~bore~~ regale you with Part II of this post (same idea but I’ll make a cotton toile flower ) once I work up enough energy to actually put together another one of these tutes! They look so simple when someone else does them. When I do one? Not so much.

Anyway, I hope you can take away from this at least a snippet of an idea or two to help you with your next project. Until next time……….