You know what a sucker I am for Clover goodies?
I found this in a basket of similar things in the Quilt Shop in Sedona and thought that, before I find a home for it, I’d better give it a try.
Kanzashi flowers have been doing the rounds here, beginning a couple of years ago when I trained a group of craft judges, one of whom shared her knowledge and skills with the rest of us. We made them from scratch, broadly following the instructions in this book, along with a few tutorials online. Since then, these little flowers have popped up all over the place and it’s always good to know what’s what when faced with something like this to judge at a village show.
I also had a bottle of this to try. I went for the unscented version and gave my fabric a quick spritz before cutting, in the hope that it would stabilize it a bit during the manipulation. It was great – can recommend wholeheartedly.
So, I cut my squares as instructed, undaunted by the huge sheet of instructions, because by now I know that only part of them are for me – the largest proportion of that huge sheet is translations into a wide variety of languages.
The gadget is a piece of plastic into which the folded square of fabric is clipped.
Having cut around the shape with sharp scissors (I had to go and find the smallest, sharpest pair to do this well), the instructions offer advice to use a 70cm length of strong thread to stitch in and out of the numbered holes on the plastic template. There are slits for the thread to carry through and this part is quick and easy to do.
The plastic template is then opened up to reveal these long stitches.
Having removed the plastic template altogether, the thread is pulled tight and the kanzashi petal is formed. Best bit (and the reason for needing 70cm of thread) is that the next petal can be formed using the same thread – I made all six petals in a row and simply pulled them together.
Quick, easy and totally foolproof, the best bit about making the petals like this is the consistency of size and shape. Each petal is spot on, there’s no tricky bits to fold or anything – in fact, the hardest bit was deciding which was the front and which was the back.
So, I sewed a button on each side, just in case.
WI Craft judges would be a bit picky about any raw edges that might still be there – a larger button would have concealed those a little better, but hey, for a first go, it’s not bad.
If you’ve been reading my WI Craft Blog, then you’ll know how I’ll store all of these bits as well. I might just have to get hold of the other sizes/shapes too, now I know they work well.
What might I do with them? Well, Clover’s blog this month is full of ideas.
