Felt Dahlia

I came across one of the most amazing felt flowers I have ever seen about 3 weeks ago, and I've been saving it for an evening when I had a little free time to spare because it looked like it might take a while. But looking at the picture, doesn't this look worth it??



The best part about this felt dahlia is that it comes with an awesome tutorial, which you can find here. I encourage you to actually go to that site for the full tutorial, but I'll still share my attempt!

Last night, I grabbed my felt and some scissors.



Then, per the instructions on the tutorial, I cut out my strips: three 1.5" strips, two 1.25 inch strips and one 1 inch strip. I then laid them out nicely to take a picture, and by the time I put my camera up to my eye, someone decided to lay right on them!



So if you want a pretty picture, you'll have to go to the original tutorial.

I then began to cut out the squares, and subsequently the petals.



And you know what? 30+ squares then 30+ petals take a really long time to cut out. By the time I reached this point in the flower, it had been an hour and a half and it was 10:30pm. So instead of venturing into the assembly part of the flower, I called it a night and started again after dinner tonight.

So here's where I differed a bit from the tutorial: instead of using FabriTac, I used hot glue. Why? I didn't have FabriTac. Simple as that. So I used my hot glue gun to hot glue the base of each petal so it curled around.

The next place I strayed: the diameter of the cardboard. I originally cut out a 2" diameter circle like the tutorial suggests, but when I hot glued the 3.25" felt circle around it, it looked nothing like the picture. I then decided to do a 2.5" diameter circle instead. I'll let you be the judge, but I definitely think the larger circle looks much more like the picture in the tutorial.



Once I had my base ready, I moved on to the petal assembly. Using a spot of hot glue on the base of each petal, I moved my way around the circle, gluing them all down as close to each other as possible. I ended up needing 2 more petals of each size than I had already cut out, so I had to make some more. I think I put my petals closer together though than she does in the tutorial. Here's the progress after the first outer ring:



I worked my way around with all three sizes of petals, until I had filled all three layers.



How awesome does that look already?!



I then needed to do the center. This part also took me a long time, because I didn't have pinking shears and thus had to slowly and carefully cut a uniform wavy edge around the circle for the center as well as the strip that gets all coiled up. But in the end, it was completely worth it, because it put the finishing touches on my fantastic dahlia!



Though I didn't end up putting the picture pocket nor the pin on the back, I will probably end up finding something to affix this to soon! I'm thinking maybe a purse? Haven't decided yet, but wherever it goes I will display it proudly! I think it turned out so great, and was totally worth the hours it took to complete!