11.24.2010

Flowers for the Chandler Children's Choir

Today's project: Corsage fabric flowers!

As many of you know, I sew the choir uniforms for the Chandler Children's Choir. You can see photos of the Junior choir's white dresses and vests here and here. Each dress comes with two sashes and two headbands: one in red and one in purple. I also do alterations and hems on the black dresses that the Advanced choir girls wear.

For the upcoming Christmas concerts, the choir director and all of her assistants wanted some matching pretty flowers to wear, so we came up with these beauties for them using the same red fabric that the sashes are made of.



Though the red shiny fabric is spandex, the back of the flowers is actually felt. I wanted to have the largest flower be a bit more sturdy so I used Wonder Under to fuse the shiny red spandex to a piece of red felt. The rest of the layers are the spandex fabric only.

For the flower pattern, I just Googled "fabric flower" and came across this image that I used as my template for the flowers. I kept increasing the size until I had the size of my largest flower- about 5 inches across. I printed that out as a pattern and then decreased it a bit, printed that one out, and kept doing that until I had four sizes. It took awhile to cut them all out, and then I just layered them, making sure each successive layer was offset from the previous layer. When I got done, I pinned them all together and took them to my sewing machine where I used a zig zag stitch to sew them all together in the center.

When I got done with all of that, they still looked a little too plain, so I had an idea. What doesn't look better with a little bit of bling on it? I took seven Swarovski crystals and put them in a tiny flower arrangement in the middle, and it completed the look.


After I was all done with those, I sewed a pin to the back and they were complete!


I think these are going to look so pretty during their Christmas concert!



HookingupwithHoH

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11.22.2010

Stitch it Together Try It Badge

Last Friday was our Brownie Girl Scout meeting where they earned the Stitch it Together Try It Badge.While I wanted to introduce my 3rd grade Brownies to sewing, I had some limitations:

1. There were 11 girls
2. We only had 1 1/2 hours for the entire meeting
3. These girls were either 8 or 9 years old and in 3rd grade.
4. Did I mention there were 11 of them?!

I really wanted them to take home something that they could actually use, so I decided to have them do these little bags out of felt:



I simply cut a bunch of felt into 5" x 9" pieces. Then I cut a button hole about 1/2 down from one of the 5" edges. On the other 5" edge, I threaded a needle and did a couple of stitches to attach the thread to the fabric where the button would be sewn on, so they could skip the needle threading and knot tying and go straight to sewing.

After they all did their buttons, we divided into two groups. One worked on lacing our troop's recipe book together (a project from a previous meeting) and the other group worked on folding up the felt and sewing up the sides. Then they switched.

As you can imagine, even with lots of parent help, it took a lot longer than I thought it would and only one girl finished the project. The girls all seemed to really love doing it though and were sent home with this cute sewing kit from the Dollar Store so they could finish.

I've already had one girl request more felt so she can make more, and both of my daughters have made several more little bags. I love this project because it is simple and beginner sewers can see a fast and cute result.

Here is the bag my 3rd grade daughter made and is very proud of: