Hints on Making Rolled Flowers

I love color.

I really love bright colors. So I made a few rolled flowers and attached them to pins.

I’m not going to re-invent the wheel here. Meaning I’m not going to over explain this project.

There are zillions of tutorials out there on making rolled flowers. Search for the topic on Pinterest and I’m sure you’ll come up with lots of blogs telling you to just take your glue gun and a scrap of fabric and blah, blah, blah, it’s super easy to create scads of pretty flowers. This is actually my fourth or fifth attempt at this project.

Seriously.

I’ve tried the glue gun (and made a mess of my fabric with residual glue on the front of the flower). I’ve tried hand-sewing. But that didn’t work to keep the flower flat after about two rows of rolling.

So I thought I’d provide a few hints that helped me be successful during this attempt in creating some colorful flowers from scraps of fabric using my glue gun.

I used some knit fabric scraps. You could use quilting weight cotton fabrics, but I’d suggest cutting them on the bias to avoid too much fraying. But knits won’t fray! Love it.

Cut a few strips of fabric about 1” wide (doesn’t have to be uniform) and about 12” long. Tie a knot at the end.

I found that the key to making nice-looking flowers was to glue in tiny amounts at a frequent interval. Meaning this project took a long time. (In the past, I’d put a whole line of glue between rows of rolling and it would squeeze onto the front of the flower and ruin it.

Anyway, start with a tiny dot of glue. Keep the fabric away from the glue with your finger. Now put the glue gun down and roll 2-3 times and stick the rolled fabric to the glue. (Be careful not to burn your fingers. I did.)

Now keep adding tiny bits of glue, rolling a tiny bit of the fabric, and then stick the rolled fabric to the glue.

When you get to the end of the fabric strip, you can hide the end by sticking it to the back of the flower with more glue.

I glued my flowers to pins.