Nifty Thing I Ended Up Making

What's a handmade vase without handmade flowers??

What can I say? Never say "never"?

I actually do say that... quite often, as a matter of fact. So it was a serious blunder on my part to have named a particular series of blog posts, "nifty things I'm never going to make".

While I don't foresee a whole lot of exceptions cropping up down the road, these tulips by Almudena of Retales de Mil Colores have enticed me ever since I first saw them. (A few weeks after I posted about these, a second tutorial from Singer's website reminded me yet again that I was itching to make tulips!)

The clincher came when I was out grocery shopping with Mom in mid-April. Dozens and dozens of newly arrived tulips caught our attention. The displays of bright yellows, oranges and reds made it clear to me that I didn't need pastel fabrics; I just needed some green fabric for the leaves.

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Is it odd not to have any green fabric? I searched through my closet, my bag of clothing donations waiting to be delivered to Goodwill, as well as my actual fabric stash and nothing (usably) green came up.

My last resort was to ask Mom if she had anything that I could recycle. But then hubby and I stopped in at a Dollar Tree for some household items and I found these fat quarters (and some floral tape) for $1.50 apiece.

Dollar tree finds that won't strain your crafting budget...

The checkered fabric is a bit thin, but the solid is surprisingly high quality. Three dollars worth of fabric for the cause is well justified, considering that I didn't want to do the project with crazy off-beat fabrics for leaves.

The original YouTube tutorial provides instructions for making three different styles of tulips. Two of them are made with rectangular pieces (for which dimensions are given); templates can be printed for the closed tulip and leaf. (Note that those two templates need to have a seam allowance cut around them.)

New for me... assembly line making...

My plan was to make nine tulips (three of each kind), with ten leaves. My fabrics would be from the old motorhome curtains for the red, the old duvet cover AKA new motorhome curtains for the yellow, and a selection from my Lily and Loom purchase for the orange.

For the stems, I recycled some plastic straws. (Since they are falling out of favour everywhere, why not put them to use?) I cut some in half and some in thirds so that I could use the pieces to add extra length (just squish one end and push it into another). This enabled me to make tulips in varying heights.

Wrapping them in floral tape took me a couple of tries to get right, but it went along swimmingly thereafter. (Just remember that stretching the tape a bit will activate the waxy adhesive that makes it grab onto itself.)

This "open" version needs to have a hole punched into the bottom...

I had a couple of the extended length straws come loose after the fact, but I managed to fix them. The tulip heads aren't heavy enough to cause any problems, but in hindsight, I probably should have taped the straws together first — with regular tape, before wrapping in the floral tape — to keep them from coming apart or bending.

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I would usually go into an extensive discussion detailing the entire process to make things easier for those wanting to take on the project, but this tutorial was clear and easy to follow. Everything is fairly simple; it's just a bit repetitive because you're likely to want to make more than just one or two tulips.

"Closed" version...

In fact, after I'd finished the first nine, I went back to my fabric scraps and found enough among them to make three more closed tulips... including the "directionally challenged" yellow and white striped one seen in the photo above. (I had originally planned for the stripes to be vertical, but lost track of that requirement and didn't realize my mistake until I started stuffing it.)

For these final three, I used the straws in their original length and I didn't bother adding any leaves.

What would you call this... the "ready to open" version?

Speaking of leaves, I made them slightly differently. I did not hand stitch the ends closed — that seemed like an inefficient use of my time. Some Stitch Witchery came to my rescue there. I cut a small segment of it, slid it between the two layers of fabric and fused everything closed with a hot iron. (Easy peasy if you have the stuff; not saying that you should go out and buy some if you don't have any. Fabric glue will also suffice.)

Sewing more veins on the leaves...

I also thought the leaves would look nicer with more detailing, so I sewed vein patterns on all of them. (In her tutorial, she only sews a center line on the leaves.) I also placed them at different heights along the stem rather than just close to the top of the flower.

Closeup of a leaf...

Not having green fabric means that I don't have any green thread. The gray thread that I use for a lot of applications worked well.

I will add another two cents: the measuring and marking that she does before taking those single stitches to create the four divisions for the ready to open and open style tulips aren't necessary if you're good at eyeballing things. In both cases, all you're doing is finding the middle of a relatively short distance. (I just made creases at those spots with my fingernails.)

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Originally, I was going to put these tulips in my Voilà Vase. But here's the thing: the vase is tucked into a corner, high enough almost to be at eye level. I'm often looking up at it, which is not a great angle from which to look at long stemmed flowers. (The artificial arrangement that's shown in the photos for the PDF pattern is still what's in the vase today.) So after experimenting with my fabric roses in it, I decided to leave it as is.

Side view...

Which is how my fish bowl vase finally ended up with its own bouquet. Once I decided that it was going to be the final home for my tulips, I made sure that the lengths of the stems were suitable for it. That's something to keep in mind if you're going to make any sort of fabric flower for an existing vessel: think about what stem lengths would be best.

I also followed Almudena's suggestion and tucked some fake greenery into the base of the bouquet. It fills in the opening of the vase quite nicely.

View of "the front"...

I like that this is a scrap and recycling friendly project. The tulips require very little fabric (the closed variation requires the least), and an old pillow that's fallen out of favour will provide more than enough polyfil for them. While my leaves were interfaced with scraps of fusible fleece, regular fleece from an old sweat shirt or pants will work just as well. (And if you can find something green in your closet, you'll already be ahead of where I was.) And of course, the straws for stems idea is yet another recycling win.

All in all, I'm so happy with my turnabout decision on this "never gonna make" project. These forever tulips will absolutely brighten my days going forward, regardless of season.

A total of fifteen tulips made!

Know that else? After I wrote up this post, I made a few more... I ended up with fifteen tulips and fourteen leaves. Turns out that none of this was as laborious as I originally imagined it might be, so I won't rule out adding even more to my collection.

Hmmm... something to keep in mind with Mother's Day coming up!

'Til next...