Flower Pins

Last year at our Pride Festival, TG got this flowered lei, this year, for more rainbowed goodness for Pride Week, she decided to make the flowers go further as scatter pins.

We discussed the best way to go about it, since the flowers have unfinished edges, we had to decide if we liked them like that or wanted to seal them. She said she liked the frayed edges. We did experiment with some sealing options. Heating the edges carefully with a lighter worked, so did glue which looked good with glitter added. I do recommend if you're going to use glue and glitter to use a fine applicator and a crystal glitter. Colored glitters can be a bit too much. Nail polish will also work or of course Fray Check.

To make these pins, all you need is fake flower lei like the one shown above, thread, needle, scissors, buttons and pin backs. The pin backs we used were from a thrift store, and safety pins would work too. The buttons were from my button stash. So the only thing we bought new was the thread.

I made one, and was pretty careful about my stitching. I stacked the flowers and tied a knot in the thread and pulled put it through the top of the flowers, around the pin back, back up through the flowers, then added the button. Sewed it carefully in place then hid the knot between the button and flowers. TG decided that the thread ends wouldn't matter very much since it was for her jacket and knotted on the back of the flower.

There are still a lot of flowers left. I'm planning to use smaller buttons and sew them to some hair pins (the U shaped ones) for myself and TG is thinking of other things she can use them on. So far, we've talked about purses and miniature fairy dolls.