How to make a lace flower pin

First off, WOW! I’m totally overwhelmed by the great comments and questions on my giveaway post! I’m going to compile everyone’s questions into a new massive FAQ and it’s seriously been very helpful! So thanks! There’s still time to enter too. I’ll close comments and pick a winner around lunchtime on Sunday (noon EST).

I thought I’d write up a tutorial on how to make a lacy flower pin, since I haven’t seen one posted yet. I can’t take credit for this idea though. I saw it used on fabric in a craft magazine (though I can’t recall which magazine it was in). All I did was apply the technique to lace! You can use this to make fabric flowers too — but you should use thinner fabric if you do.

The first step is to go to your local thrift shop and find a huge gallon ziplock bag of lace and trim for $1.

supplies!

Got it? Good. You’ll also need thread and a needle (hand-sewing thread works the best). You’ll probably want to use thread that actually matches the lace you’re using. And you’ll need a pinback or safety pin and a bit of felt (I’m using some heavy sew-in interfacing here because I had a few scraps left from a bag project). If you want to embellish it with buttons or beads or whatever, you’ll need that too of course!

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The first thing is to cut your lace so that you can visually divide it by five. Most lace that I’ve used for this has a “bumpy” side and a flat side. I count ten “bumps” and leave half a “bump” on each side to sew them together (does this make sense?). If you want to just mark your lace with a little fabric pen or something, that would work too. Just make sure you can easily divide it by five (or however many petals you want).

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Start at the top of the lace (the bumpy side) and make a long running stitch down. You’ll be stitching U shapes. When you get to the top of the U, bring the needle around to the other side of the lace so it can pull the lace (see the picture because I obviously can’t explain this).

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Keep going till you have made five U shapes and then start pulling the thread to gather the lace.

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Eventually you’ll have something like this:

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Use your needle and thread in the back of the flower to shape it nicely. You just have to play with it, adding a stitch here and there and seeing how the front is shaping up. You’ll want to push and pull on the petals with your fingers to get it nicely shaped too.

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Sew your button on (if you want a button in the center).

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Now is the time to embellish it with other lace, trims, ribbons, whatever. Just use your imagination and stitch them on the back of the pin.

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Finally, sew a pinback onto a bit of felt and attach it to the back. Or just stab it with a safety pin. Honestly, I’ve done both!

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Okay, so now that you’ve made one, you can just start gathering the lace while you’re sewing the U’s. The wider you make your U’s the bigger the petals will be:

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Sit back and marvel at your creations. I put these on my hats and I’ve used them to dress up bags. They would make super cute headbands. I’m not really a broach kind of girl, but I’m sure you can make beautiful broaches with them too!

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Please let me know if something wasn’t clear! And if you make any, leave a link to a photo for me to see!

This entry was posted on Friday, May 29th, 2009 at 9:22 amand is filed under Crafty, Tutorials. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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