Quilted Flower Embellishments from Fabric Strips

For a lot of years now I've been called the queen of embellishment, I'm not sure if I like that term or not but I definitely embrace it. I love to come up with new and different ways to make my process easier and more interesting. And I love, love, love texture. So I wanted to come up with some very simple flowers that were kind of ornate, kind of funky, and were all about texture and so what I did was some simple layering of ripped strips. Now, if you're not into the ripping business yet I really highly recommended it. This happens to be a piece of silk and I clipped the edge there and I can just rip that. And it gives me all of this great texture here at those edges and it adds so much interest to whatever it is I'm using that strip on. Well, I've got two flowers going here and I'm going to put a third flower right here on this piece, and to do that, I'm simply going to cut these to the size I want that flower to be and layer them up and I'm kind of making little Xs as I go. If they end up bigger than I want them to be I can trim them before I stitch them down, I can trim them after I stitched them down, it doesn't matter. I'm just going to play with color as I lay this down and everything's got a center most area that it's working against. And I'm basically going to fill in all of the little areas in between the strips and play with color a bit as I do it. Manipulate those strips as I go. And I think one more strip and I'll add this dark strip here, put it there. And I think I'm going to pull the whole thing down just a bit. There we go. I don't want to cover this little flower here yet. Now, I could use my free motion foot to do this but there's a lot of thickness there and my machine tends to like to go through thickness better with its regular foot on. So I'm just going to be using the reverse as I stitch this. And I'm going to be stitching, basically, a giant asterisk here in the center, so lines that cross over each other. And I'll be using that back stitch to get back into the middle as I go. And I'm going to make the whole thing about, oh, an inch long, maybe only 3/4 of an inch cause this is a smaller flower. So I'm going to stitch about 3/4 of an inch and then I'll back stitch to the middle and then I'll just go in a different direction. Back stitch all the way across and then back to the middle. And I'll just keep going around, going back to the middle each time I want to change directions or change the angle, I guess would be. And I just pivot a little bit and move over about 1/8 of an inch or so. And then I kind of survey it and see if I need more lines, which I think I do, they're a little farther apart than they are here so I'll put a few more lines in there. I think just one more and we're good. Okay. So now our flower's stitched down, it's got this wonderful kind of asterisk center that looks like stamens, you can see what it looks like there on the back. So it looks good front and back which is always important on a quilt. And now I'm going to give it a little better shape, it's not as round as I'd like it to be. So I'm just going to trim some of these, get rid of some of the hangers on and some of the ones that are in the center I'm going to cut a little bit shorter, the ones that are in the middle of the flower so that it looks like the petals are getting smaller as they go in. I think that works. And then I'm going to fluff it up and there's my third and final flower. So we've got these wonderful little dimensional flowers, lots of texture, made out of strips of fabric. How easy could that be? And great, you can wash them, they'll fray some more, they'll just be fabulous. You should give it a try, easy and fun.