When Chica and I attended the Winter 2009 CHA show in Anaheim, we had the opportunity to meet Stefanie Girard, author of the book, Sweater Surgery: How to Make New Things with Old Sweaters (Quarry Publications). Stefanie had a fantastic make-and-take that involved making your own pins out of felted material. Seeing as I have been dying to try felting for ages now, I was quite excited to learn the basics.

After the tutorial, I not only left with some basic felting skills, I also won a signed copy of Stefanie’s book. How very exciting! After reading through the book once I got home, I was ready to try making some more felted projects. With Easter just around the corner, I thought it would be fun to design my own flower corsage to wear with my pretty Spring dress.

First, I picked out felt colors to match my dress. I went with regular felt instead of felt from sweaters because I wanted it to be really light so it wouldn’t weigh down my dress. The pin we made with Stefanie was a bit thicker and therefore heavier. It looks great on my winter coat but I wanted a different look for my spring dress.

Next, I cut out three simple leaves from my green felt. I placed one leaf overlapping the other on top of the felting needle mat and then used my needle-felting tool to join the two pieces together. All you have to do is punch the tool’s needles into the felt repeatedly, which locks the fibers of each layer together and they are stuck! If you have never done this before, you have no idea how much fun this part is! Well, at least for me….

I repeated the process to join the next leaf to the first two.

With the leaves finished, I cut a simple flower shape out of a piece of yellow felt. I centered the flower over the leaves and repeated the process to bind them together. If you look closely, you can see the needle marks in the middle of the flower I affixed a smaller flower shape in a pale pink to the middle of the yellow. I was almost finished but it still needed a little something more.

The finishing touch came when I sewed a simple button to the very middle. I used a basic needle and thread to hand stitch it on top. To make it into a pin, I attached a pin back that I found for sale with the jewelry-making accessories. It had a sticky back on it so I just had to peel and stick it to the back of my flower. I enjoyed making this so much I am going to use the same technique next week to decorate an Easter bonnet, so stay tuned!