I think I’ve got all the flower making out of my system now. Here’s the last two necklaces I made. Again I followed the tutorials in the book The Artful Ribbon.

I’ve noticed lots of embellished t-shirts lately too. Lots of flowers, lace and ruffles. These four are from Anthropology. I love Anthropology but can’t justify spending money their. They are a bit out of my price range. But they have some pretty stuff to look at and be inspired by.

This my attempt at creating my own flower embellished t-shirt. I bought two t-shirts of the same color, one in my size and the other in a large. I then created a template of circles. I cut the circles out of cardboard and used these to trace circles onto my large sized tshirt. After cutting out many circles in the three sizes I started to stack them together. I stacked one large, one medium and one small circle together. I then sewed these together in the middle. After having a bunch of these sewn together I started pinning them to the t-shirt. The key to getting them to look full is to clump your circles close together. The closer you sew these together the fuller it will be. Hopefully that makes sense. I really need to get better with taking pics of my work in process. I get so busy working I just forget.

Below are the circle sizes I used. Just click on the image to make larger and print these to use. It should print out at actual size.

I decided to make something for myself this weekend and got carried away with making a bunch of these flower bibs. I love how floral necklace bibs are in right now. I LOVE Victorian fashion and these remind me of that. It’s the attention to detail that draws me in. I also love fashions of the eighteenth century.

I made the flowers on all these necklaces from wired ribbon. They are really quite easy. I followed the tutorials in the book The Artful Ribbon by Candace Kling. I was fortunate to have gotten to take a class taught by her called Fabric Manipulation at the Surface Design Conference held a couple of years ago at the Kansas City Art Institute. I was super inspired after taking her class and had wished I had gone into Fiber as a major instead of Illustration. Oh well, I can’t change the past.

I wish I had taken a pic of an individual flower but got caught up in working and forgot.

Here’s what the back looks like. The book recommends using crinoline as backing to sew the flowers to. Use a heavy quilting thread when sewing down the flowers otherwise your thread could break. Once I had the flowers and leaves all sewn together I covered the crinoline with felt. You could sew this down or use a fabric glue. I chose glue.

Here’s the finish. I decided to change the shear material where the jump rings are held to velvet ribbon that I had lying around. I happened to find the chain with pearls at Michael’s and thought it would compliment the flowers.

There is no rule to making these. It comes down to laying things out on the table, moving it around, seeing how it all looks together and then sewing it all together.

I highly recommend this book. Even if you’re not going to make ribbon flowers, the pictures are beauticul to look at.

Here’s the second one I made. Love the single corsage look to this with the delicate chain. I also added yellow crystal beads.

This last one is my favorite. I wish the picture had tuned out better. I just could not get the lighting right. Though you can’t see them in the pic, I added small black and grey crystal beads around the centers of the flowers. I added crystal buttons to the silver flowers.  I also used some freyed sating material on this one. That’s what you see peeking out the bottom.

Check out the book below if you like Victorian fashion illustrations. This is fun to look at.