Flower Accessory

I was just reading one of the blogs I follow and was intrigued by her most recent post, the Anthropologie Knock Off Pin by Kojo Designs. I immediately wanted to make one for myself but thought I might be able to use some of the t-shirt yarn I made awhile back. It was just sitting on my shelf in a nice purple ball waiting to be used. I'm going to include a step-by step tutorial for how I made mine, it is very much like the one at Kojo Designs with a few steps nixed out to make it faster as I knew I didn't have much time to work today. I think this project took about 45 minutes to do but I was interrupted about 10 times by a 3 year old who didn't want to take a nap so I think I could probably do it again in 30 if I could work uninterrupted.

Start with a ball of t-shirt yarn. It's best to have slightly thicker yarn but mine was pretty average to thin and it turned out alright. I can imagine it would have been better with thicker yarn.

Cut twenty 6 inch long strands of the yarn.

Knot each one in about the middle of the piece.

Cut a circle out of felt or some other such stiff fabric that won't fray. I just used basic cheap black craft felt.

Now loop one of your strands and stitch it down to the felt. I just used 2-3 stitches per strand before moving on to the next one. I didn't knot the thread each time, I just kept going.

Work your way around looping and stitching. I did one layer around the outside then went back to the inside and stitched more of them down so that the outer edge of the loop fell just inside the first layer (see here, I've done a few of the second layer but am not finished yet).

When you're finished with the loops, switch to a thread color that matches your beads. Here I'm using cheap fake pearls (it's what was within reach on my craft table) so I used white thread. I just stitched each one on being very deliberate about putting them a bit too close together so they'd be pretty crowded in there.

And at last, here's the final project:

This is where you'll have to decide if you want to attach it to a hair rubber band, a headband, a pin, a clip, etc. The black felt circle should be plenty strong to hold just about anything. I think I might put mine on a hair band because I wear a lot of pony tails and have recently thought it might be nice to make them look a little more intentional and not so much like a default hair-do. I think putting a pretty purple flower in my hair will do just that.

Thanks Kojo Designs and Anthropologie for the inspiration.

Thank you for reading,
Julie