Making Fabric Flowers

I really think fabric flowers are neat. I made a few of my own from scraps (and even scraps of scraps!)

Start by sewing some strips together. It doesn't matter if they're exactly the same width.

Then, fold the strip in half and sew it with very LONG stitches near the raw edges (my highest length setting on my machine is 4).

The strip will probably gather as you sew. If not, carefully pull the bottom thread to gather the entire strip so it looks like this:

Then, starting at the middle and sewing down the raw edge, make a circle and stitch each row together. The back won't be too pretty (I'll have some ideas next week for covering this up):

And there you have your flower! To finish, just stitch the raw edge on the tail to the back of the flower.

Some variations:
For the pink flower below, I just gathered a single strip (to try this...don't fold it over to double it...just gather!).For the navy flower, I used a wider width of fabric. This is my favorite look.For the green flower which looks very full, I used a narrower width of fabric, doubled it, and gathered it very tightly before sewing it together.And here's a pink one I made with scraps from a t-shirt skirt.