New Directions

This poor little blog has been sadly neglected and I think that it’s time to change that. I haven’t been spending much time in the kitchen these days but I have been fortunate to get the chance to spend the day crafting with my boyfriend’s sister Ali. We made the easiest, prettiest infinity scarves and flower pins that one of my favorite bloggers posted on her super awesome website That's What WE Said that she runs with her BFF Shelly. Seriously, go check it out because they are awesome.

I got a little too caught up in having fun making these flowers that I didn’t take the best “how-to” pictures, so if you need any help, go to Kristan's post about how she did it and her pictures will probably help.

What you need for the flower pins is:

• Synthetic satin – we used polyester satin like Kristan did and it worked fabulously! You really don’t need a whole lot, you really shouldn’t need more than 1/8 a yard of each color you want.

• Buttons – for the center of the flower. They’ll be up front and on display so choose cute ones!
• Hair clip OR sweater pins – we bought hair clips, but we both unhappy with the kind we got. I wish we had just bought pins to put on back of them, but oh well!
• Needle and thread
• Straight pins
• Glue gun
• Candle

First things first. Just embrace it and put Christmas on your Pandora. Do it, and you’ll be happy. :)

Now that you got your music set, figure out what size you want your flowers to be. Ali has a Sizzix which made our lives SO easy. We used a die set of circles to cut out our fabric. The biggest was about 4 inches and the smallest was maybe an inch-ish.

Once you have all of your circles cut out, light up your candle. Carefully hold the edges of your circles close to the flame until they start to curl up a bit. This is why you want to make sure you get synthetic satin, the real stuff won’t do it quite as well. Do me a solid, and don’t set your circle, hand,or anything else on fire.

When they’re done, they should look like this. When all of your circles are to your liking, stack them up, pin them with the straight pin if you need, and sew the button on to them. This might be fairly obvious, but I felt like it was much easier to do one stitch through all of the petals, then sew on the button than to try and do both at the same time.

What you end up with, is absolute adorableness.

Ali made this one, and I love the button she used so much!

This is another one that she made; I love that she used more than 2 colors!

So then for the infinity scarves you need…..an adult XL or XXL T-shirt. And a pair of scissors. That’s it!

If you have a rotary cutter, this would be the place for it. I don’t so I folded up the shirt twice and cut right underneath the armpits, then right above the bottom hem.

Then open up your loop, stick one end under your feet, and pull up for all you’re worth!

The shirts we bought were 50/50 cotton and polyester and they were a little hard to stretch. I’m curious of a softer shirt would stretch better, I’m going to find a cheap one and test it out.

I totally spaced getting a picture of the final product, but I will do that tomorrow!