labricoleuse | Felt flowermaking experiment

So, I have written a few posts this summer about the collection of millinery designs i created for retailing at the pop-up boutique School for Style in Williamstown, MA (which now has a Facebook page)--fascinators and straw hats.

The fascinators have been selling really well, so I started thinking about what i might do if the pop-up continues into fall/winter, when felt comes into play. I thought i might give a stab at some felt flowers, make up some prototypes and see if that'd be a viable new style. I really love the felt dahlias that Lillibet's Millinery does, so that was my first style to try out and see if i could put my own spin on it.

There are, in fact, loads of tutorials out there on how to make felt dahlias for "craftsy" purposes, apparently often used as a corsage pin, so i started out by reading several of them and looking at the different variations in how people cut their petal shapes and how they pinched them to create dimension (the two links show two different methods).

I also knew that i was going to make one major change in the methods described in every tutorial i read--they all rely 100% on glue to assemble the flower, and i'm generally opposed to structural reliance on adhesives in fine millinery. I won't say there isn't a place for glues at all, but glue adds weight and clumsiness, and fine millinery is never weighty or clumsy, IMO. Hand-stitching gives the milliner much more control over accurate placement of an element, and is easily reversible or removable.

While it is probably fine to glue all the petals onto a base for a corsage one intends to wear once or twice pinned to a dress or bag, a hat is meant to be worn more often and more prominently--hi, it's on your HEAD--so i wanted to employ as much stitching as possible. I don't trust glue--if it's not heavy and gloppy, it often fails in the worst ways, and i don't want my name on a felt flower that sheds its petals one by one!

In making a style for retailing, i make it at least twice in order to get an accurate idea of the time spent to create it (the first time is always longer than every subsequent time, and you often refine the method between the first and second iteration) and the quantity of materials needed. I also had a friend who had expressed an interest in a felt dahlia fascinator, so i offered to make one of my prototypes according to her specs and if she liked how it turned out, she could buy it.

This is the first one i made, in a scrap of cream felt i found in a remnant drawer.

This flower above is not the one i made for my friend. The first one is the one I'm allowed to totally screw up and experiment with. After making this one, i learned several things that i wanted to change in the second iteration, which are as follows:

These things take around 60-75 petals if you make them as full as this cream one. If i were going to do several in a collection for retail, i could not keep the cost down and also hand-cut that many petals in three different graduated sizes. I decided to cut fewer petals the next time around, and in only two different sizes.

I hand-sewed every element of the cream one, and it took long enough that the retail price point would still be too high for the target market. Because you assemble the petals into their curling shape, then position them on the base, then attach them, i decided to cut down the assembly time by using glue to curl the petals, but hand-stitch them to the base.

I didn't like the thickness or length of the pistils in the center of the cream one once i got it all put together, so i made a mental note to cut them twice as thin and half as long.

My friend wanted hers in a dark charcoal grey. Here you see some of the petals pinned out in position on a dolly head, and some of them in the background pinned down while the adhesive along the pinch dries.

The finished dahlia.

Underside of the dahlia.

Here i have added a second oval of felt as a lining to cover the handstitching spiraling the actual base oval. This cleans up the back of the fascinator and gives me a nice smooth place to put my milliner's label. You also see two bands of 1/2" horsehair--the friend who wanted this one said she'd like the option to pin it into her hair or even to slide it onto a barette or hairclip, so these allow her many different attachment alternatives when wearing it.

Ultimately, even the second iteration took more time than i could really spend if i wanted to sell these as a retail style--people have an expectation of what they will pay for a fascinator, and these take too long. If i ran a shop where i had several assistants and apprentices, these would be a great style for teaching them careful cutting and trim-stitching techniques, but in a sole-proprietorship situation, I can't produce them fast enough to make it worth my while, since the majority of the production time is actually spent in cutting out the petals! I may still mess around with trying to see how i might speed that up with tesselations, because they sure do turn out lovely.