100 Layer Cake

Remember Michonne’s super cool vintage rockabilly hotrod wedding from last week? She generously offered to share a tutorial of her pretty fabric flowers she used to decorate her tables. And Jen Rau sent over a few more lovely photos of the finished products.

Michonne’s inspiration came from Emerson Made’s line of lovely fabric flower accessories. You’ve seen them around the blogs right? They are sooooo pretty.

Tools:

Craft needles
Fabric (100% cotton and tulle, cut into the shape of petals)
Scissors
Thread (She used a darker thread for the tutorial so you can easily see the stitches)

Now we’re going to let Michonne do the explaining since she’s the expert here:

“A few notes before you get started:

Take the small/bottom part of the petal and make a small overlapping fold. By adjusting just how deep the overlap is, this will adjust how dramatic of an angle the petals will have. When I start out, my initial petals are very perky and stand nearly straight up.

I like to thread my needle with both ends of the thread. This gives a sturdy stitch (two threads thick) AND it creates a loop at the end to thread through for anchoring instead of having to knot which creates bulk and frustration in tiny projects.

Sewing on the first petal. Don’t be afraid of stitching at this phase. The inner ring of petals needs to be relatively sturdy. The structure of the flower is dependent on these stitches, if they are loose, the flower will be floppy and look weird. Besides the stitches are easy to cover up later.

Sew on second petal making sure to overlap neighboring petals.

Sew on third petal, I add petals to the left of the previous petal (either direction is fine, this just works best for me) making sure that each petal overlaps the previous petal.

By the fifth petal, the first row of petals should be approaching a full circle depending on how large of a a flower is being made. I do not like to make the center too small because it gets hard  to work around when adding the outer petals.

After the center row of petals is firmly attached, start adding petals to the outside. Place the newest petal on the backside of the flower where the the previous row’s petals overlap. I find that the spiral-wise additions keep the flower round.

It’s ok to add extra petals wherever they look needed. Sometimes the flower will look lop-sided because certain petals are closer together than others.

To add dimension and fullness quickly, use two different fabrics in the same petal. Place them on top of each other (displaced slightly - mother nature isn’t perfect) and then fold the bottom, eyeball for placement, and sew into place.

For the center of the flower (to cover up all that stitching) Take one or two fabric circles and fold them in half and then in half again (you’ll end up with basically a quarter of a circle). I like to use the same colored fabric + tulle.

Then sew the final fold together making sure to incorporate each fabric. The stitches will end up on the underside, so it does not have to be beautiful.

Then with another circle, just place it inside the center of the flower, covering up the stitches. I kind of twist the center. At this point I use a hot glue gun - for covering up my stitching.

And then after many late nights of folding and sewing and gluing, you end up with an entire army of beautiful fabric flowers. So worth it!

Thanks so much for sharing Michonne! And thanks Jen Rau for more of your beautiful photography!

Michonne also has a little blog about all the projects she did for her wedding that you can read over here.