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Friday, January 21, 2011

Taffeta Flower Tutorial

I saw this idea on one of my very favorite blogs, "Make It and Love It". I think Ashley (the author of Make It and Love It) and I would be very good friends if we actually knew each other! I just really admire her blog, blog's pictures, sewing skills, and all her ideas.

Though this was not an original idea of mine, I wanted to make my own tutorial for it because I had some trouble with a few steps and found some solutions that worked for me and might work for you, too!

You will need taffeta (I bought 1/8 of a yard which was more than enough for two headbands and a pin), felt, beads, a headband, candle, and a glue gun.


I used my low-temp glue gun. I highly recommend that against singeing your fingertips on the regular gun.

Cut the taffeta into circles/ovals of varying sizes. I used 3-4 circles for each flower.

Now you need to get your candle going.
I do not recommend children help with this project! I burned my fingers once or twice.
You want to hold each taffeta circle above the flame just until it starts to melt. The edges of my circles did turn black in some spots. If you don't like this, go ahead and cut them off and try again, holding the circle further from the flame.

Here are my melted circles:

To assemble the flowers, I just stacked the circles in descending sizes (smallest on top) and hot-glued each circle to the middle of the last. Then I put a dot of hot glue on the top circle and put beads on top.

I free-hand cut some leaves out of the felt.

I melted the edges of the felt in the candle, too. At first, I just held the felt pieces with my fingers.

Then I got smart and found a kitchen utensil to help me protect my hands.

A picture of the melted leaves:

I hot glued the flowers and leaves to a stretchy headband. Then I put extra hot glue on the back to keep it all together and to keep it from sliding around while wearing it!
Here is a picture of me wearing the headband in my hair. My hair doesn't look this sloppy from the front, I promise!
I used one flower to make a pin. To do this, just hot glue the flower and leaves to a pin back.

Here's the finished pin:
Here's another picture of one of the headbands! I used different beads on this one:
I really love making things I can wear! I have forgotten how much I love doing crafts...I guess I've been doing too much sewing lately!

9 comments:

  1. Those are so cute! What a great idea!

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  2. Lovely. I've actually tried these for show clips. Incredibly nice~

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  3. Wow, those are really cute. Too bad I dont have a tafetta source locally.

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  4. Love the tutorial, thank you! I am making organza and tulle flowers for my daughter's wedding and am always looking for a better way to do things...love your low-temp glue gun idea! I think I will have to go buy one now, my high-temp gun melts the organza and the thought of hand-sewing all those petals and beads is awful. We have sacks and sacks of petals all cut, singed and ready to assemble. You have just saved us a huge amount of time. Hugs!

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  5. thanks for the comments! Molly, so glad you got an idea to do the wedding flowers! Good luck!

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  6. This is what I have been looking for! Thanks! How do I print this? So I can have a hands on copy?

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  7. to print it, what I would do is select the whole entire post (including pictures, if you want them printed, too!) and then copy it. Past it into a Word document and print it from there. Then you won't have all the other stuff from the web page. Maybe there's a better way? I don't know! Good luck:)

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  8. What size circles did u use?

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    1. I actually used a variety of sizes, it doesn't matter as long as each circle that is layered on top of the last is smaller.

      However, to ball park the circles (since I free hand cut them all) I started with 2" for the base of the flower and shrank them from there.

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