Weddingbee Blog

After finding a few flower tutorials on Google, I was playing with  my newly purchased (extremely expensive) Swiss fabric. Before I knew it, I had crafted this little beauty:

Ohh bees, I fell for this adorable little flower and wanted to make more. My fingers craved the tactile comfort found in sewing and I opened up to a craft I haven’t been able to undertake since I moved to Switzerland. The most sewing I’ve done in the last three years was when I made curtains for our flat on an old secondhand sewing machine. (And that was mainly done to avoid buying expensive Swiss curtains!)

Soon I was buying more and more supplies to make this project a reality and the costs were adding up… but so were the flowers. Each day at lunch time from June to August, I would sit outside by lake Zürich and sew flowers. I became known at work as “that girl who sews flowers” and every day someone would ask me, “How many do you have left?” I don’t know. A million?

One by one, my flower collection grew. I tried different shapes, sizes, fabrics and embellishments to make each flower unique as I perfected my flower craft. After a while I had enough to test out if I liked where this DIY was going. I pinned a few flowers on a ribbon for a simple mockup.

I was also playing around with some chiffon flowers I made which had a very different style. I wasn’t sure if they would match all the materials I had in mind, but with some pins and a mirror I could easily decide what I did and didn’t like. Along the way I sent pictures to my bridesmaids for their feedback and to share with them. (Extra points if you recognise the T-shirt below!)

Satisfied with my trials, I decided it was time to go back to the fabric store and buy enough taffeta to make the sashes out of something sturdier than ribbon. I’m a cheater and I used my floor tiles and a postcard to quickly and easily measure out and cut my pieces in a straight line.

After I cut the pieces I ironed them in half and cut the ends into points using the same postcard above as a guide.

After ironing I pinned the sashes and got sewing. Admittedly I was pretty lazy about this. I didn’t bother changing the thread in the machine to red because I’d have to figure out how the bobbin in this machine works again.

After sewing, I folded the sashes inside out and had a small hole to sew invisibly. I’m not the best invisible sewer, so you can tell the first two sashes are not as good as my last attempt. Either way, it wouldn’t matter because I would be covering up the edge of the sashes with flowers.

Finally, near the end of August I decided I had enough flowers to make my three sashes. I only had to figure out how I wanted the flower arrangements to be, which was surprisingly the hardest part of this whole process!

Up next, I wrap this project up!

Did you have any projects that took months to do bit by bit?