How To Make A Fabric Hair Flower

Hi, I'm Janie Lawson, and I'm a milliner. I run the Glam Hatter's Tea Parties. Today we're going to learn how to make Hair accessories.

In this tutorial, I'm going to show you how to make a fabric flower. The fabric flowers you're going to be making are a bit like the ones in my hat. You can do them like that or you can have them on a fascinated clip.

We're going to be making a single one today. Once you have got the hang of that, you can make anything you like. So what you need to make it is a cotton organdy, wire, a clip, glue, threads and mortar.

You can get all of those in your local haberdashers, or you can visit our website and have a look at our Glam Hatters craft kits. Now, the way that these are made is the edges are rounded, and the way to do this is to wet your fingers. If you've ever rolled a cigarette, you will be really good at this.

You pull it, so that you know which way the curve goes. Then you just roll the edges. This is something that you might need to practice, to get the hang of, at first.

Once you have got it, it is really simple. It needs to click. So I keep wetting my fingers, and I just roll the edge of the fabric.

I roll all the way along and I end up with this shape. You can see that I've cut the strip on the bias, and then I've cut diagonally at the end. This part is going to make one of the flowers.

With my pliers, I grab the wire and I fold over the end. In millinery you always use a double thread, to keep everything secure, and you have a knot at the end. Trim off the excess.

Now I am just going to pop some glue, this is regular glue, it is better than super-glue since you do not want to be permanently stuck to your flower. I put my glue on there and roll my thread around. You will want to roll it on the outside.

You're going to fold this down, and this is going to become the centre of the flower. Pop it on to your wire, fold the fabric around and wrap your thread around at the same time. That's the centre of the flower.

The trick now is to start gathering this into little pleats at the bottom. Each time you do that, you're going to wrap the thread around to catch the fabric. This fabric is called cotton organdy, it is quite difficult to get this in any colour except black and white.

What I have found is that if you get some car spray paint, or better, fabric spray paint, you can spray the fabric any colour you like, and it gives it a nice crunchy effect, which is great for making flowers. It makes the fabric easier to work with, it's more paper-like. You can see that I'm starting to stitch through, to hold on to the thread.

I'm going to add a little bit more glue into the top here, working down the wire. I love making these, I feel like I'm sculpting a shape. You can have a lot of fun.

I'm just taking time with these. It gets a bit tricky because you do get glue everywhere. But we are going to cover that up in a second.

I've got this really nice shape going on. This here is going to be part of my leaf. It is already rolled on one edge, and I am now going to roll along the other edge.

I wet my fingers and give it a little roll at the end. That is my leaf shape, I'm wrapping it around. You don't want to leave it out like that, because once that is on your hair, it will hang down quite far.

What's really nice is to curve it back on itself and pop a little stitch in so you have a lovely shape. We don't want to see this bit of wire. I have cut another bit of organdy on the bias, it's about two inches wide.

I've folded it over and I've ironed it to make that nice crease. I'm giving it a bit of a stretch. I'm using this to hide that thread, it will be easy for a white thread to stitch this down.

I tie it down with a stitch and then going through the loop. I'm giving it a trim. Trim this off.

I'm folding it under, and I'm going to wrap it around the stem. I really like the black and white contrast. It's very vintage.

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