Shopping therapy

The spring is coming, the whole nature is singing about it! The flowers have begun to bloom and the birds are singing cheerfully! And with in spring comes also the need for renewal! I made an extensive shopping therapy, first within Etsy and last week I went to the shops! No I did not buy new spring clothes and shoes, to be sincere I didn’t even look at these windows! This winter I managed to gain  five entire kilos and I have decided that I will not buy anything new until I lose them! I bought however various materials in order to experiment with new creations! I bought gorgeous fabrics and felts and made cute brooches!

The fabric flower pins or corsages made intense appearance in this spring  fashion shows and they are a fantastic accessory for decorating  an evening dress, or to  wear on your favorite jacket or it to adopt the style of Sarah Jessica Parker, placing a pin flower above a simple t-shirt.

Tutorial how to make a flower corsage with silk muslin:

1). Cut for the individual petals about 24 recktangles of fabric approximately 7x7 large. You can cut some smaller and some larger pieces. On the top of each piece cut with the scissors formin two curves:

2). Stitch the petals together along the bottom edge using a gathering stitch, one after another, until you have all the petals stung on the thread:

3).Draw the fabric up tightly, creating a flatt circle of petals and tie off:

4).Embellish the flower with a button, or beads:

5).Cut a disc from felt and sew a pinback on it, or cut with the scissors two small lines and pull the pin back through them without sewing :

 6) Glue the disc to the back of the flower with fabric glue and your corsage is ready!

I made this brooch for this week's eurpean team challenge, which is "your favorite traveling destination", chosen by Zsazsazsu!Visit her blog to see all the lovely creations made for this challenge!. I love to travel, and every place on this planet is for me a favorite destination, but I chose Paris, which is a fantastic city, and I have visited three times, but I can never had enough of it!

The shibori technique

After the lovely comments on my first shibori scarf -thank you all so much-, I thought to write a liitle about this art.

 Shibori is an ancient Japanese art and has many interpretations. It essentially denotes shaped resist textile, and is commonly associated with dyeing cloth with a pattern by binding, stitching, folding, twisting, or compressing it.

It is utilized in knitting and felting, for transformative knitting, either by the use of physical resists (marbles, corks, hazelnuts) that prevent specific areas of knitting from felting, creating unique fabric with bobbles and dimensionality, or by the use of non felting fibers as resists, for example a silk yarn with a wool yarn.