Twisted Roses

Kind of sounds like a band my son would listen to. 

I'm going to attempt to show and tell how I did the roses on my box.  There are about a gazillion craft blogs out there with tutorials for them.  But I know K won't look for them, she doesn't have the time.  This is for her.

Don't judge my photos though, I've never attempted to take a pic of myself doing something. If I could have, I would have taken a photo of myself standing on my desk hot melt gluing trim on my simple window treatment.  I've learned that laughing at yourself is very healthy.

The twisted roses.

You need a strip of cloth, mine is about 3 inches wide and about 2 yards long.  The wider the strip the plumper the coils, the skinnier the strip the thinner the coils are on the rose.  The length doesn't matter because you cut it off when you want to.  That's why I like mine longer rather than shorter.  You also need your glue gun and glue sticks of course.

Start twisting your fabric,

 

coil the twist,  holding the center with a dot of glue.

Keep twisting and coiling, gluing the coil along the the outside edge.

Every once in awhile pinch the rose to flatten it.

Twist, coil and glue until your rose is as big as you want it.  Cut your excess fabric off.

Fold your cut edge to the back and glue it down.  Pinch and squish again. Y'all like these technical terms?

You can add a leaf if you want.  I used felt for the box but for this one I'm using ribbon.

I cut a piece about 5 inches long, put a drop of glue in the middle and folded the ends up into the glue, then gave it a twist and pinched it into a V shape and held it while the glue set.

I made this rose a lot bigger than the roses for the box.  Because I nearly always have one of these sitting on my desk. 

I cut a circle the size of the rose out of the cork I had left from my memo board.

and glued it on the back of the rose along with the ribbon leaf.  As my girlies would say, TA DA, a coaster.

But I didn't like the way the edge of the cork looked because the cut was so rough.  I used scissors and it crumbled it a bit.  I twisted, coiled and glued one more strip of fabric around the edge of the cork.

Much better!

Too cute!

Just to show you the difference in the size of the roses.

I was going to put 3 roses on the box, the little one was for that.  The box didn't need 3 roses. 

Poor little rose without a home.  I put it here and there and finally a light bulb came on.  I glued a magnet on the back and now it's on my tray that has been hanging on the wall waiting for magnets.  Too cute too!

It needs some companions though. 

Really simple, right?   The coaster took me about 10 minutes to make, even stopping to take pictures.  The smaller roses even less.  I've seen some where they added stuff to the center like pearls, beads or stamens.  I liked mine plain.  You can also make them out of tissue paper to embellish paper stuff.

 

I learned something doing this though.  There are some things I just cannot do.  Like take pictures with my left hand.