Kanzashi Flower with Words

I know in my last post about Kanzashi In Bloom I said we’d spend a couple of weeks on these flowers and meet up here later, but obviously I couldn’t wait. However, I still expect all of you to complete your assignments, and I will definitely be making more Kanzashi flowers, pushing the envelope each time and sharing with you along the way.

So, with book in hand, I made “Gramma’s Flower”, a gift for my mom. This was super easy and would work great with not only names, but I thought how wonderful to make a flower of encouragement with positive and loving words for a friend who may be going through a personal battle, such as cancer. Or a few flowers for the teacher with the names of her students. Everyone loves a personalized gift!

I won’t be giving a tutorial on how to make these flowers, that’s all in Diane’s book, but I will share the part about printing the names. Below is the basic layout for 6 petals. Click to keep.

Choose a light colored fabric that doesn’t have a pattern that would compete with the words. Using the layout as a guide, create squares and place names in the red area. I used 12pt. lowercase SandraOh font. Don’t print the guide, place it on a layer that can be hidden or removed when printing. Be sure to print your own square outlines, this will keep things accurate. Test your layout by printing a sample out onto plain paper and fold the petal with the longest word to make sure it will not fall into a fabric fold. Note: If I were to make one like this again, I would flip a few names before printing so as the flower petals turn, the words along the bottom don’t go upside down.

Then, cut a piece of fabric just under the size of your paper, tape along the entry end and up the sides a bit. (I used white paper tape, not showing up so good in the photo.) It took a few times for my printer to take the fabric covered paper, it helped if I loaded extra plain paper in the tray behind the piece I was trying to feed through.

Once printed, remove the tape, cut the squares out and start folding & pinning. The rest is in the book. I made and added a fabric covered button to mine and finished off the back with a brooch pin-back.