Craft Book Review: Fun to Wear Fabric Flowers

A while back, I went through a stage of wanting to make fabric flowers to add to my clutch purses and strappy shoes! I think that using fabric flowers in this way can really brighten up any old accessories and give them a new lease of life.

So I bought the book ‘Fun To Wear Fabric Flowers’ by Elizabeth Helene Searle, in the hope it would help me in my fabric flower mission!

This book contains 36 versatile flower projects which can be attached to more or less any item of clothing, hats, shoes, bags and headwear.

Most of the fabric flowers in this book are hand sewn together with a few that are made up using a sewing machine.

Projects include a range of gathered flowers, five petal flowers, classic roses, ruched flowers, pansies and individual-petal flowers. At the beginning of the book, there is a section explaining what type of fabrics are needed for the projects, equipment and supplies to use and basic techniques for stitching flowers together.

Sewing is not my strong point and definitely something I need to get better at! Because I’m not great at stitching I struggled to understand some of the instructions for different projects particularly as not all of them contain diagrams as part of the instructions.

Although there is an explanation of basic stitches in the beginning of the book, I would recommend that if you’re a novice sewer (like me!) to have a quick look on youtube for video demos of how to do the stitches. Or just ask someone in the know to show you!

Flicking through the book, in my opinion, some of the photos look a little dated and some of the colours used for projects aren’t really my cup of tea. This is just my opinion I must stress! But that aside, if you have the perfect fabric in mind, the formula is here inside the book to create some spectacular fabric flowers.

So, if you want to know how to make just about any fabric flower under the sun, this is a great book which explains how to do it. If you know what you’re doing with sewing, you should have no problems at all but for beginners, having a look at some basic sewing tutorials first will probably help you.

I hope you find this book review useful! You can also read my other craft book reviews here. As always, I’d love to hear from you so feel free to get in touch!