Hi hi cutie pies!
Last week I had started on starching some white cotton I had still lying around - initially to embroider on, but I thought I might aswell try using it for flowers. I didn't really get that far though, as it was a pretty busy week. I actually wasn't home a lot.
Anyhoo. So, I started on starching the fabric last week. Made my own starch, dipped the fabric in it and let it dry. Today I was home all day long, so once my husband went to work, I enthusiastically started on drawing some petal shapes onto the fabric with the Frixion pen I normally use for embroidery. Then, cut them out, blow dried them (so the marks would vanish), made them wet with a brush and painted them with watercolor. Since ribbon embroidery is sometimes done with watercolor aswell and fabric paints often have a similar effect as watercolor (silk paints anyway, not sure about others) - I thought, why not try that? I didn't have any fabric paints and I merely wanted to practice, so heck, good enough for me.
In the beginning, I thought I had used way too much paint, as the colors were pretty dark and saturated. But thankfully, just like watercolor on paper, it dried up way lighter. They were dry pretty fast, so after some embroidery, I was ready to get my flower making toolset!
All went pretty well shaping the petals. It was super fun to do and less scary than the first time (this was my second). Later on, I'll write a post about how to do so. I actually thought this was gonna work out just fine!
But then, I had to assemble the flower and that's where everything went down hill really fast. I didn't have any glue at hand, so I thought I'd just handsew it all. Which worked out great for the flower, but not so much for the stem. (No surprise there in retrospect.) So I ended up taking it apart, which in turn resulted in the flatlay above.
I gotta say - I've had way uglier accidents in the past, including a hideous aquarelle the other day! But they're part of life and especially when you're learning something new. In the end, you don't fail, you only learn, right? However, hopefully next post in this category does include a final result!
x K.
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