Make Decorative Fabric Flowers

Want to capture the beauty of a fresh flower, without the inevitable wilting and drooping? Show your child how to use fabric scraps to make a cute (but fake) flower that can be used to decorate her room! Pieces of an old, ripped t-shirt, holey pair of jeans, or faded towel can be cut up and recycled into makeshift flower petals. She can place one in a vase for a unique, handmade decoration. Or, for more crafty fun, she try her hand at making an entire bouquet of pretty fabric flowers!

What You Need:

• Fabric scraps
• Needle
• Thread
• Wooden skewers or chopsticks
• Heavy duty glue
• Measuring tape

What You Do:

1. Help your child cut up the fabric scraps into 2" x 4" rectangles (or larger).
2. Now, she can stack the rectangles so that they overlap at the mid-point.
3. Show her how to thread the needle and put it once through the midpoint of the stacked rectangles, to keep them in place.
4. She can fan out the scraps so that they form a round flower shape, and then continue using the needle and thread to sew through the center of the rectangles and hold them all in place.
5. As a finishing touch, have her cut out a quarter-sized circle from the fabric scraps and glue it to the center of the flower.
6. Use heavy duty glue to attach her fabric flower to a wooden skewer, and then let it dry.
7. The fabric flower is finished! Use it to decorate your child’s room and invite her to make as many as she wants.