Mini Fabric Bow

I found an off-cut of fabric in my craft cupboard ages ago.  I thought about making some kind of bow for a while, but wasn’t quite sure where to start.  I tried finding a simple tutorial online to start me off. Most of the things I learn to make start by following a tutorial (usually on a stitch or technique) and then I start playing around with it once I’ve learned the new stitch/technique.

I couldn’t find anything I wanted in particular…  I then decided to Just Play.  I didn’t have a lot of fabric at first so I wasn’t that worried about getting things wrong or making too much of a mess.  I didn’t have much to lose!

At the time, I wasn’t feeling very well.  It turned out I had bronchitis, and had had it for almost a month when I started playing around with the idea of making a bow.  Because I was so unwell I wanted it to be as simple as possible!

I started by cutting a rectangle of fabric that I folded in half length-ways (right-side to right-side) and stitched around the edges, leaving a small gap at one end for turning right-side out.

After turning it right-side out, I made tiny little stitches along the long edges in a sort-of loopy way.  I’m sure it has a proper name but I don’t know what it is!  I’m still learning how to sew but usually end up just making things up as I go along!  Hopefully you can see what I mean from the photograph!

I also sewed closed the small gap I left for turning.   I then made a gather stitch down the middle of the rectangle and then pulled it together, tacking it down to hold.  I didn’t like it much at first because I thought it looked a bit messy in the middle.  To solve that, I simply cut a small piece of felt and wrapped it around the middle. 

It wasn’t exactly what I had in mind, but it was a start…

Knitted Corsages

Do you remember those flowers I knitted?  Well, I played around with the patterns a little longer, come up with a pattern for a slightly larger flower and then set about making something else from them.  I love the bouquet idea but I wanted to try making corsages from them. 

Sewing them together seemed easy enough but using the yarn made them too bulky.  I then tried some very sticky, very messy glue (anything involving glue and I end up in a right mess!) and that was great… Until they ended up in pieces a few days later.  For some reason the glue just wasn’t up to holding them together for very long.

On my desk is a small red and white polka-dot box.  It has ribbons in it now but it used to have a load of thread in it.  I thought that perhaps simply tacking the flowers together with some sewing thread might just work. 

Like with the bouquet idea, I sewed down a few buttons to the centre of the smaller flower.  I then attached a brooch pin to the back of the larger flower and then covered the base with a small square of felt.  I tried to use felt and thread that matched as closely as possible with the knitted flower.  Then, with the pin attached, I layered up the flowers and then tacked them together, first with the smaller and middle flowers, and then I tacked them to the larger flower, trying to keep the stitches away from the felt.

The thread worked a lot better than the yarn and because it’s strong, I was able to pull it tighter in places to give some shape to the corsage.

Here is a selection of the ones I have made so far…