TUTORIAL: JOY'S KNIT FLOWERS

This tutorial will be on one of the knit flowers I made a pattern for to come up with the following knit top:

I have searched you tube several times for "knit flower tutorials", but I found very few.  I have already shown one style on the other yellow blouse in my blog. It has flowers just on one side, and they are from a tutorial I found somewhere out there.

This particular design of knit flower is one I came up with all by myself.  I took pictures as I was going through the steps. 

STEP 1:

I went in PhotoShop Elements 9 to "Edit".  I chose a shape that was already there and put it on a blank sheet of paper.  I then copied the shape two times so I could make the flower in three different sizes.  Here is what it looked like when I printed it out:

STEP 2:

I printed a copy of this on my printer:

STEP 3:

Cut out each shape.  If you plan on using them a lot, you could glue them to some cardboard or that plastic template stuff.   Here they are with knit already cut out under them, but you get the idea. 



STEP 4:

Attach the 3 flower shapes to your fabric.  I cut out two thicknesses at a time with two different rotary cutters.  I used a tiny blade for the smallest flower, and the larger blade for the two bigger flowers.  Two thicknesses is all I could do well with knit.  You can experiment.  I used a combination of my weights and pins.  You have to keep moving the weights out of your way, but I used them anyway. 

STEP 5:

Now all you do is separate your flowers into stacks of small, medium and large.  Then you get your blouse laid out nice and flat on the table, and begin to arrange your flowers how you want them.  I put pins in to hold them on the blouse.  I was going to put one, then two, then three, then four, and finally put five. 

STEP 6:

Now here is where it gets tricky.  It is a WHOLE LOT EASIER to pin them on -- 3 in a stack -- then to sew them on.  I tried to sew them on with all the pieces pinned down as in the picture above, but soon decided that was not going to work.  You have to start WITH THE BOTTOM PIECE ONLY.  I sewed one whole flower, then went to the next and the next.  You could sew all the big/bottom pieces on at one time, then the second flower and then the littlest on top. 

What I chose to do was to sew a vein in each petal.  At first, I just sewed the petals on flat.  On the second flower, I started scrunching the petals up a bit as I was sewing.  By the third flower, I was scrunching each petal up quite a bit.  I decided I like the scrunched up ones better than the flat ones, so I went back and redid the first two.  You can see in the picture directly above that the flowers are PINNED on pretty flat.  The final outcome was flowers that were pretty poofy.

That is all for this one.  Hope you will try these fun knit flowers.  I read an article by somebody who had gone to a thrift store and purchased a too-big-for-her sweater set.  She cut up the shell into petal shapes and made knit flowers and sewed them to the cardigan.  She took the cardigan in on the sides and the arms to make it fit her.  It was darling!  Sorry, I didn't make a note of where I saw it.  I'm always looking at something out there in internet land, and I'll be darned if I can ever find the same thing twice!   Her knit flowers were totally different than these.  I probably would have made them, instead of these, if I could have found them again.

Hugs, Joy