Fabric Flowers Tutorial at Some Art Talk

Tutorial: Make a fabric flower wreath

While we’re on the subject of flowers..Here’s some paper flowers she did last year.

And no post about fabric flowers would be complete without mentioning Craftypod Sister Diane’s Kanzashi in Bloom
book, and her cool video on making kanzashi flowers.

April is officially STASH BUSTER Month, per one of my favorite blogs Crafting a Green World.

What, you may ask, is a fabric shop owner doing participating in such an non buying event?

WELL, I am an extremely talented hunter and gatherer of wonderful fabrics. I am there, I love fabric. Now I own a shop full of it, BUT what do I do with all the great fabrics that are languishing unused in my sewing room. Well, one thing for sure, I can’t use them for shop samples, I did that ONCE and I finally took it down after explaining over 100 times that NO we did not have that fabric. So this month will be about sewing for me, my family and maybe for craft shows next November & December.

TRAVEL TISSUE Cover:

I started this tutorial about a week ago by searching for other folks’ tutorials, there are a bunch out there. After reading a few of them I found I needed to change them, so here is my version of how to make this super simple gift.

Read the Whole Thing!

It took some trail and error to get the pattern like i wanted it, so here’s how I did it. (This is all done in Photoshop, but if you don’t have photoshop, here’s a great tutorial on how you do the same thing on paper!)

-I drew the elements of the design in pen, then scanned it. I used Illustrator’s Live Trace function with the Comic Art preset to get the lines like i wanted them, then moved it back into Photoshop.
-Then I used my new favorite technique to pull the line art to a separate layer.
-I created a new 8″x8″ image in photoshop because that was my desired dimensions. The plan here is to copy/paste the individual design element line art into separate layers, for ease of placement.
-To get the repeat pattern, I took one of the robots and a few of the stars, and laid them out in the center of the new image. I merged those line art layers into a single line art layer when i was satisfied with the placement. Then I used the Offset filter in Photoshop (horizontal & vertical set to 1/2 the width/height of the full image, wraparound checked*). That moves those images to the corners. Then I positioned the rest of the robots and stars in the center.
-I then merged all of the line art layers, leaving me with a background layer, and a line art layer. I created a new layer for the colors, and put that in the middle. Then I colored the image.

While in beta, only I can order the fabric, but if anyone wants some, let me know and I’ll order it for you!
It makes a nifty tiled desktop wallpaper too!

*credit: I used this tutorial to figure out how the offset filter worked.