Orange Hair Clips

A friend of mine always wears a flower in her hair at work, and it always looks so pretty. But the flowers kept dying, so she changed to a fake flower. Still pretty, but I got thinking - I'm sure that I could make something pretty for her. She's such a lovely person, and I really enjoy working with her. Anyways, so I made 2 flowers. The first one below is the one I'll be giving to her. It's made of offcuts from the The Birthday Quilt and a beautiful button that I had in my stash. I'll be making more of these!!  The second flower was an experiment to see how this technique worked, and I really enjoyed it. It worked out really well, and I'm thrilled with the results. The yellow and orange layers remind me of carnivals and music.  I hope you like them too. I'll be making a whole BUNCH of these for the Christmas market at my children's school.

For both flowers, a little hair clip has been attached to the bottom, but I'll be getting some crocodile clips to make them a bit more secure.

 

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Birthday Quilt

In my previous post, I showed you the Kanzashi flower that I'd made for a quilt that I was making. Well, the quilt is complete, and was given to my mother. It is a lovely quilt and she loves it. I hope she gets lots of use from it. But I thought I'd show you all what it looks like.  ..... Picture overload alert!!

I appliquéd a little parasol onto the quilt, and added a butterfly onto it, with invisible thread. I also stitched the flower on, so that it would be secure. It's so warm and snuggly. I also added some black & gold buttons all over it, just to add a little black to the orange.

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Two Tone Kanzashi Fabric Flower

When normal people get a 'How to ...' book, they generally tend to start in the beginning, with the beginner projects .... then progress to the intermediate, and then, in time, progress to the advanced projects. Yup. That's what normal people do. Those of you who know me, will know, I'm anything BUT normal.  I pick up the book, flick through the beginners pages, slow slightly at the intermediates, then look at the advanced and say 'Yup! I want that one.'

A week or so ago, I decided that I'd like a nice flower to go onto a quilt I'm making. Great. I searched Pintrest, and found loads of various tutorials. But they were fairly boring. So, I did my own thing. .... Of course. The tutorials called for a square of fabric. Now, never having made one of these in my life before, I set about making a half square triangle .... also a complete first for me .... and then proceeded to make the flower petals. Well, I can tell you, I was mildly surprised at how well it turned out. It's now been stitched to the quilt, and looks fabulous, if I say so myself. Pics of the quilt will be put on here soon - I'm only half way though the binding.

The quilt is a mixture of a printed fabric with oranges and yellows, and the plain orange in between. The black just helps to break the brightness up a little.

 I used a nice button for the centre, just to finish it off nicely.

More pics to follow soon. 

PS - By the way, the 'How to ...' book I refer to on this occasion is metaphorical. I didn't even bother with an actual book - the internet is all the books, and encyclopaedias one could ever wish for. :-D

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