Fabric Flowers

Being out of town, and away from my sewing machine doesn’t mean that I’m away from creativity and fabric!

Every year for Thanksgiving, I go to Daytona Beach for a week.  I fly down – with hubby, sometimes with kids, and this year with friends – and have a solid week of not being home, not having my stash and not having several sewing machines.  It’s my time every year to go low tech with my fabric art work. 

There’s an added challenge to this endevour - I travel light.  I don’t check bags and that means two things:  I don’t have a lot of space and I can’t bring large, sharp objects.  This means my projects have to be small – both in starting materials and in finished product – and have to use items that I can take onto the plane.  I don’t bring much of the projects with me.  I rely upon local shops.  I also take books along on my vacation and when I finish one, I drop it in the library at our resort.  This means that my projects get the space taken up by one to three books.

Two years ago, I brought along one of my jewelry plieers (small, short nose) and stopped at a bead shop.  I made several nice necklaces that I still wear to this day.  Last year, I decided to knit Christmas stockings for my daughter and her significant other.  I bought yarn, needles and a $2 scissor at a local craft store.  I figured that the needles could come back on the plane (they did), but was unsure about the scissors.  That why I bought cheap and I left it in the room when we left.

The stockings that I made were nothing spectacular.  I could have made much better with fabric, the sewing machine and the embroidery machine.  However, that was not my goal.  The goal was to create something out of love for my daughter; something made over time, with my own hands, and demonstrative of my love and care for her.

This Year:

A few days before I left, I went to one of my block of the month groups.  This particular group is a good one and shows new products and patterns for the quilt shop.  That sort of show and tell is a good move for the shop and it worked on me.  One of their new things was patterns for large fabric flowers.  I bought one – an orchid – and decided to make a bunch of them on the trip.  I figured that they will be very nice decorating tote bags and purses, in addition to being very nice gifts on their own. 

The pattern pieces are circles of fabric.  I cut out enough for 18 flowers before leaving home and packaged them up.  I also packed thread, needles, a small scissors (ginghers stork) and pins.  The resort we stay in is a fully equipped condo.  I always have an iron and an ironing board – two tools that I also needed for making the flowers. 

I needed a couple other things, but didn’t have them on hand.  Our first day in town included a visit to the craft section of a local walmart.  I bought a mini glue gun, glue sticks, a sheet of felt, beads and stuffing.  Ok, I did have beads at home but I forgot those and the stuffing.  Stuffing was a bit of a quandary in the store.  The smallest choice in the craft section was a bag of fiber fill the size of a small pillow.  I only needed tiny bits of it for the center of the flowers and certainly didn’t want to bring back that large bag.  After a little thought, I went to the Health and Beauty section and bought a small package of cotton balls.

So, here’s the end product!

How many I’ve completed so far:

Front view of one of the flowers:

Back view of another.  The pin back is another little touch – this will make them good as small gifts for people as brooches.