Tutorial: Satin Flowers How-To

So the 2 flower tutorials I've done before are on the misleading side...because I haven't used either one of the those flowers in the bouquets I've been putting together. They just weren't matching up to the image I had in my head, so I played around with them and came up with these. Here is how to make the flowers I've been using in my satin flower bouquets.



Cut a piece of material, a rectangle. Look how crooked mine is--cutting a straight line is not a prerequisite, trust me! The fatter your material, the wider your flower will be. The longer your material, the tighter wound it will be. Mine is about 2.5 inches wide and 7 inches long, give or take.

Fold the material in half lengthwise, so you have a long rectangle. Fold the wrong sides of the fabric together so the right sides of your fabric are on the outside.

Thread your needle with coordinating thread, and knot it at the end. Pull your needle and thread up and through both layers of fabric. Sew long stitches all along the top of the rectangle, with the folded edge at the bottom. You want to sew the 2 frayed edges together, so you should be sewing closest to the frayed edges.



Take big stitches. Mine are at least 3/4 of an inch. If you sew little stitches your fabric is going to be way too gathered. You only want a loose gather, so take big honking stitches.



When you get to the end of the line, cut your thread, leaving about 2 inches to give you something to work with. Do not knot your thread or anything, it's supposed to be unsecured.



Gently pull on the loose thread you just cut to loosely gather your material. I found, through lots of trail and error (mostly error) that a really loose gather works the best and gives the best shape for the flowers.



Once you have the fabric gathered to your liking, start to loosely roll the fabric. I always try to keep the frayed edges even with each other when I'm rolling the material, to keep the flower consistent.



After you roll up your loosely gather rectangle, you should have something like this. This process is not even remotely scientific...if you used a bigger piece of material or gathered the material more tightly it will look a little different, but this is the basic idea.


Before I start gathering the material, I thread my needle and knot my thread so I'm ready for this step. I gather the flower at the bottom and sew through the layers of material at the bottom to secure the material. This part doesn't show in my bouquet, so I'm usually messy about it. I also fold down the fraying edges in the center of the flower and on the edge and sew them down, so I don't have any frayed edges poking up.

I've been using normal floral stems from Hobby Lobby, in the heaviest gauge they have. I fold it over and a bit and sew it on to the flower like this:


Ta da!

Tomorrow I'll show you how I've been constructing the bouquets using these flowers.

If any part of this is unclear, or if you have any questions at all, please let me know, I'm happy to help! This is really such an easy project, and it is so forgiving of mistakes.