Tutorial: Ribbon Flowers

As promised, here are instructions for some of the ribbon flowers I was working on a few days ago. If you have all your supplies ready to go, and your glue gun plugged in, you can make one of these in less than 10 minutes, and probably in no more than 5 minutes. They really [...]

Tutorial: Another Fabric Flower

Fabric flowers are always an easy way to embellish bags and accessories, and there are dozens of ways to make them. The one pictured here isn’t unusual, but I thought I’d photograph the steps for you while making this one last night, and give you the directions that I typically use. I also made a [...]

How-To: Bleach Discharged Velvet Bag, Part 2

For a while now, I’ve wanted to make a little bag out of bleach discharged velvet. I’ve had the handbag frame for over a year, and I’ve had the velvet from yesterday’s post even longer than that. But I just never came across a pattern I wanted to use, and couldn’t motivate myself to [...]

How-To: Bleach Discharged Velvet Bag, Part 1

For an easy and effective do-it-yourself vintage technique, there’s nothing quite like bleach-discharged velvet. In addition to removing dye and giving your fabric a lovely, time-worn look, the bleach also changes the texture of the fabric, and it will feel soft and well-loved. Although you can bleach-discharge any color of velvet, I find that I [...]

Triangular Cosmetic Bag

Here’s an easy bag that goes beyond the basic flat zip pouch. A well-illustrated tutorial can be found on Craftster.org. For some directions on how to crinkle and embellish fabric, see my earlier post. For the zipper pull, I simply knotted a bead onto a piece of ribbon and tied that to the original zipper pull.

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