Inspiration is everywhere and my latest project is inspired by a picture of a quilt I saved from a sales catalog! This quilt had a floral design and the flower petals were made of ribbon and, well, I have tons of ribbon and I knew making ribbon flower petals would be a fun way to use some of it! (Ok, this didn't put a dent in my ribbon stash but it's a start, LOL!) So while I was organizing some of my craft stash, which occasionally involves looking in my file of ideas, my creative mojo kicked in! A piece of leftover fabric from another project, the quilt picture and inspiration from a crafty video, I knew what I wanted to create. This is my project Grow!
To create this art piece, I first grabbed some ribbon and cut 8 strips of approximately 3" pieces. For the flower stem, I cut about a 4" length of rick rack. I used hot glue to form each petal then glued each piece on top of the brown fabric. Then, I glued down the rick rack at a slight curve. I also needed a flower center and from my box of embellishments, I decided on a red button. To spruce up the design, I added a few rhinestones and some smaller buttons. Next, I pulled a 6" x 8" stretched canvas out of my craft stash. I placed the fabric floral piece on top of the canvas to figure out my layout but what would I do about that plain white background?
I needed to add some color to the canvas and so I dug into my fabric stash and found a charm pack called Boundless Batiks by Boundless Fabrics. It was a free gift that came along with a purchase I made from Craftsy several years ago. The colors in this pack were perfect and I picked several different squares and starting cutting the fabric into various shapes and sizes. I used Aleene's tacky glue to adhere the fabric pieces to the canvas and where I overlapped the fabric, I used Aleene's fabric fusion glue. After the canvas was mostly covered (fabric wasn't needed in the center area where the flower panel would be placed), I used fabric fusion to adhere the flower panel to the canvas. At this point, it did look great but I felt the design was not complete. As I pondered, I looked through my craft stash.
Finally; I found a word sticker, I hand cut a leaf from the fabric and adhered both to the background with the Aleene's glue. For the finishing touch, I brushed on a few colors of Distress Ink (spiced marmalade, walnut stain & fired brick) sparingly over various parts of the design. Now it's complete! This was quite a relaxing project to work on as I told myself to just let the creative juices flow and not mull over my creativity choices but go with my first instinct - this is meant to be fun!
