How to make Scrap Fabric Flowers – from your homemade fabrics

There are quite simply too many wonderful ways in which to use our recently made homespun fabric. In today’s post, I thought I would show you how I have incorporated the material in my journal. By chance my homemade journal has evolved into a visual representation of my time since March 2020. I’ve stuck to recording only the good for although there were some pretty awful times, like forced separation from Master M and Little Miss, I’d prefer to remember the happier times. One such moment, during these days was the growth and beauty of the spring and summer Cottage Garden. Today I am sharing how to make scrap fabric flowers for my journal, using last week’s beautiful homemade fabric…

I used the paper gifted to my by kind Daisy @courtyard_cottage again for my journal pages. And I put to good use both the avocado dyed fabric and homemade scrappy fabric. Mr M has always selected an Echinacea plant for any garden we have grown in any of our homes and Belle’s Cottage Garden was no different. I thought I would try my hand at interpreting this hardy perennial through my scrap fabric flowers. This is another craft which can be interpreted in so many ways to make it your own. Framed or frameless wall art, embellishments for homespun bags or maybe these scrap fabric flowers could form pretty greetings cards for friends.

I simply cut out free-hand petals from last week’s pretty pink fabric to begin. Then I raided the button jar for a few useful black fabric covered buttons for each flowers centre and sturdy dried lavender stalks acted as flower stems. I carefully overlapped each petal slightly as I glued it to the paper, mimicking only the base of the flower head assuming the Echinacea had lost some of its beauty to the summer breeze.

I planted a great deal of wildflower seed back in spring and was rewarded with swathes of scabious and cornflowers. This next little trick is a wonderful way to interpret the fluffy flower heads of both annuals and you could use any colour fabric to represent your own garden. Using a torn and frayed thin strip of fabric, I ran a simple running stitch from one end of the length to the other and carefully pulled the thread tight. In so doing, the gathered material naturally creates a circle imitating the head of my wildflowers.

Again, several strong lavender stems were used for stalks. I also had a beautiful off-cut of an old table cloth which had successfully taken on the avocado dyed pink hues and which worked perfectly to represent other flowers growing in the garden. And finally I added a strip of last week’s craft along the base of the page offering a little more floral interest. In no time at all I had created simple scrap fabric flowers reminding me of my summer Cottage Garden.

You may have gathered from my recent Instagram posts, I set Master M to it in the garden, digging over a rubble filled patch of lawn to incorporate two small rose beds either side of the arch, at the entrance to Belle’s Cottage Garden. The boy must earn his keep. As a recent wedding anniversary gift to ourselves, Mr M and I purchased several David Austen bare root Olivia Rose roses. When your daughter shares her name with such a fragrant beauty, it would be odd not to have a couple in your own garden and I have coveted these delicately fragranced roses since stumbling across them in my Instagram feed. Perhaps you are responsible. This patch of garden does indeed feel like a family commitment and I cannot wait to see what Mother Nature graces us with next summer.

Although not strictly a summer memory, I set about creating my own roses for a journal page starting with a rose page from the skip book you first read about here. This clever aging trick was found on a Pinterest page recently. Fix sticky tape randomly and fairly lightly, to your torn book page and ever so carefully peel away the tape leaving tattered and worn spots. I then chose to machine stitch the torn and aged page to its base. Of course you can glue the pages if you don’t have a machine.

To make the rose I began with a ragged piece of dyed linen which I scrunched and stitched to form my background. On the reverse of my homemade fabric I sketched a flower, snipped it out and stitched atop the linen. A few more delicate rose petals were tucked and glued and a tiny scrap of vintage silk ribbon – gathered in the same way as the scabious above – was stitched in place. Finally a French button took centre stage.

Perhaps the key to the success of these pages is in layering the design. My grass is taken from a discarded torn tissue box, the small dried cosmos heads and hydrangea petals, directly from the summer garden. And little snippets of flowers from scraps of material have all found a place on the page to create my interpretation of hope for my future rose beds.

A thoroughly enjoyable crafting session was had that day for sure and my journal is filling up quite nicely. Once complete, my hope for this Journal is to create a video of it and embed somewhere on the blog for you to see. Apparently, that’s an easyish thing to do on a blog and the grey matter should always stretch to learning new skills don’t you think?

I’ve a simply gorgeous homemade fabric project to share with you next week. The craft is such a beautiful way to use any special fabric offcut, in particular though it lends itself perfectly to this homemade scrappy fabric. I shall be offering it to you as a suggestion for a ‘you know what gift’ although be warned, so beautiful is the craft, I have made quite a few already since when the time does come to gift, I may not feel quite as altruistic as I should. Until then…x