Rolled Flower Tutorial: Nancy Style

Are you ready for this?  I'm so excited to show you what I've been working on this afternoon.  I've been perusing the Internet for felt flowers lately.   There are so many great, cute felt flowers out there, and I wanted to figure out how to make some.  I decided to go with a rolled flower.  Nothing new there, but I decided to go all Emeril on them and KICK IT UP A NOTCH.

BAM!  

Okay so I'm a nerd, and I love the Food Network (even though I don't think Emeril is even on it anymore).  But that really has nothing to do with my felt flowers, I'm just excited, can you tell?  Now that you've seen how beautiful they turn out, here's a complete tutorial on how to make them.

Nancy's Rolled Fabric Flower Tutorial

Okay so the only rolled flowers I've seen are pure felt, but you know about my obsession with fabric, so I had to add some quilting fabric to add texture and pattern.  I chose an array of felt and coordinating fabrics (I just bought some fat quarters).  I think these would be really cool with contrasting fabrics too, but for now I decided to coordinate.

Then I cut my felt and fabrics into squares.  Most of these are 6X6 inch squares, but a few are a little smaller because some of the felt squares I bought were smaller.  Any size square will do, but I'd make it at least 5X5.  I keep thinking it would really be fun to make some big ones (wouldn't they look great on throw pillows?).  In due time, I will of course. But for now this is the size I went with.  

Now head to the sewing machine.  What you're going to do is put your machine on your zig zag stitch, and sew and turn your fabric so that you get a spiral.  I started from the outside and moved inward, like this.  (Okay so if you're not a sewer, I really think you could accomplish the same thing with a glue gun.  Just put a spiral of glue on and glue your fabrics together and then go from there.  Or you could even iron your two fabrics together with wonder under and then cut out your spiral).

Stop when you get a complete spiral (and as always I can hear my Mother's voice in the back of my head saying, "don't forget to back stitch!"  That will keep your stitches from coming out).  If you were worried about how your spiral was going to turn out you could draw it onto the felt side with a marker, but I prefer to just do it free hand.  I'm a rebel like that.  It does not have to be perfect, and you can experiment with the size and distance between each line of stitching.

Now cut our your spiral with some fabric scissors following your stitches.  Like this. 

Then take the spiral and roll starting with the outer edge, and use your glue gun to glue as you roll to hold it together.

Glue and roll, glue and roll. 

Keep going.  

Then when you're almost done put a good amount of glue on the bottom, and fold over the last of the fabric.

The back should look like this.  

And the front will look like this.  TA DA! Oh man I'm in love with these, can you tell?

Is your mind moving a mile a minute?  Mine is.  There are so many great things you could make with these little beauties.  Hair things, brooches, corsages; you could put them on pillows, shirts, sweaters, purses, lamp shades, magnets, curtains, pizza (just kidding, is anyone still reading this?).  The possibilities are endless, and you'd better believe that in the days to come I'm going to be making tons of things with these. And as always I promise to take you along for the ride.