The process of making a flower brooch

Or my process anyway!! I was asked to design some flower brooches by one of my wholesale customers and to make them as recycled as possible and they have to include felt, fabric and buttons. Now I can do brooches and I can do recycled but I wasn't sure about the flower part but I thought I would try. I made a flower template and thought about making a base with different coloured petals on top - well I didn't even take a photograph of that one because it was a disaster! I didn't have any reclaimed felt that was big enough and the canvas I used looked awful! I liked the petal idea though and thought about trying that on the felt circles I get from the scrapstore. I wanted to watch a film on that particular night and so hand sewed the petals on using embroidery floss.

Quite pretty but the large stitches detract from the vintage fabric a bit so I decided to try the sewing machine next.

I wanted to try lots of different things like adding veins onto the leaves (the green felt) but it didn't work out as well as I had hoped, possibly because I used small stitches. I think I will explore that avenue later with larger stitches. I then moved onto a single vein down the middle of the fabric but not to the end of the petal - I stopped at the edge of the circle on the blue felt (I also did on the green felt) but you can't see it properly. I then decided to go to the end of the petal (the two vintage fabrics) and I think that it worked really well.

And here is the finished design.

What I really like about this design is that the petals can lie flat like the picture above and below

or the petals can be 'stood up' like the pictures below.


You'll have to trust me that it looks better in real life than it does in the photographs!

And the best bit is that my wholesale customer likes them and wants 10 in differing colours! I'm going to be busy this weekend! And of course it helps me to use up my stash! Oh and the only bit that isn't recycled/upcycled is the brooch back. Everything else is including the thread.