… grows a peony!

There are lots and lots of tuto­ri­als for these fab­ric flow­ers and I’ve long been fas­ci­nat­ed by them, but I was just a bit intim­i­dat­ed by the fact that it involves using an open flame. Recent­ly I’ve been work­ing on sewing a belt to this dress (you will see the result lat­er in the fall :D) but acci­den­tal­ly cut the fab­ric too short (this hap­pens ALL the time with my sewing. When will I ever learn to mea­sure prop­er­ly?) so I need­ed a large-ish fab­ric flower to hide the gap between the ends of the belt. So! I final­ly con­jured up the courage to make this.

I fol­lowed this peony tuto­r­i­al on Crea­ture Com­forts. I must say, the small flame of a tea light is hot­ter than I thought. I was hold­ing the fab­ric sev­er­al inch­es above the flame and it still curled up rather quick­ly. The fab­ric also caught on fire a few times :S Just a real­ly small flame, which I quick­ly blew out.

This is the first round of curl­ing before the petals were cut. I took a pho­to of it because I thought it looked like the cap of a jel­ly fish :D

And this is the fin­ished peony! :D

The petals aren’t cut exact­ly the way the tuto­r­i­al instruct­ed, main­ly because I for­got how they were cut and did­n’t both­er to look it up again… but I think it looks alright! I sewed pearly beads in the centre.

This was a lot of fun! I think I will make more of these with oth­er kinds of fab­ric! The chif­fon I used was the same mate­r­i­al I used for the dress and it’s real­ly light, so maybe that’s why it caught on fire so easily…? 

As for how it will look on the dress… it will be posi­tioned on the cen­tre back of the waist because of the belt, and the first com­ment that Mike made was, “would­n’t it look like a rab­bit’s tail?“ 

:S

I haven’t tried it on. It is indeed a pret­ty fluffy flower. We will see…

Hope you’re hav­ing a good week! :D