Kanzashi flowers

It's sure been a while. But finally here it is - all the tricks I've learned making a kanzashi flowers.

First of all you need to find some fabric for making a flower. Also later you going to use needles, matching color strong string, some beads and chucks or anything you want your flower on. One more thing we going to use for making our life easier - simple gelatin. Yes that's right. You can find some no flavour gelatin in any shop I believe.

I used gelatin to make fabric more like paper. And in worked like magic. I read before that for the same purpose starch was being used but to tell you the truth I was a bit afraid that it might leave some white spots on my black fabric. So here is step by step instruction.

•  Gelatin you melt in some warm water (read an instruction on the package and use just a bit less water then it says). Take your fabric (I cut some old clothes, as long as material is nice you can do the same.) put it into gelatin water and nicely place it on a table. You have to do this really carefully as you want fabric to dry really flat. You might have to wait 6 hours or even more.

•  After fabric is dry it's feels like a proper paper so it's really easy to cut it into squares. I used some dry soap to draw the lines so I could cut as straight as possible.

• After you have the squares you start making the petals. How big they are, how many petals you going to use and other things absolutely belong on you. Just try to make some flowers and find your own way. Here you can see simple photo instruction how to fold the petal. The rest - experimenting!!!!!

I don't use glue at all for making these. I stitch the petals, sew them together, put bread on the centre and also stitch it on a safety pin in order to make a brooch. NB!!! All the time use a thimble in order to avoid accidents. Even if you think it's easy to thread the needle into petal remember you have quite a few layers of fabric and it might be not easy at all. Safety first!