Heritage Brooch

Hi!  It’s Wini from LooneyBugDesigns.  I am poohbearbaby on the Cricut Message Boards.  I am honored to be your designer for today.  I would love to share my Heritage inspired project with you today.

I have always associated Brooches with Grandmothers.  I don’t know why but just the word Brooch makes me think of my Grandma.  I don’t remember any of my grandmothers wearing a brooch so I am not sure where the association comes from – just my weird way of looking at things.

I decided that I wanted to make a brooch for you but I didn’t want it to be made of paper and therefore look off – so I decided to try my hand at cutting fabric with my Cricut.  I had this picture in my head of this flowered brooch that was somewhat old world looking.  Where did the image come from?  Your guess is as good as mine but it was there.   I had never tried anything quite like this but thought I would give it a try.  Here is the brooch I came up with:

I started my project by picking out my fabric and trim.  I didn’t know what exactly I was looking for – but I wanted it to look a little vintage (which is typically not my style).  Here are the fabrics that I choose – I LOVE the way they look together.

I chose two fabrics for my flowers because I wanted them double sided.  So I fused the butterfly and the blue fabrics together to make a single two sided fabric.  I also fused the green dotted fabric to itself to make that two sided (with the same fabric on both sides).  You can’t really tell from the photos but the blue fabric has silver thread in it so it really sparkles in the light.  I thought about tea dying the fabrics and the lace but that was just too vintage for my style – so I left them as they were.

Next I set up my file on the gypsy.  I used the blackout feature on the Home Decor Cricut Cartridge to get the flower I wanted.  I turned the real dial size feature on (see the a button is highlighted in yellow) so that I could get the exact size flowers that I wanted.  I then sized the width of my flowers starting with 2.5” and going down in 0.25” increments to 1.25” – 6 flowers in all.  I put my fabric on my stickiest Cricut Mat and away I cut….

Now here are some things to keep in mind when cutting fabric:

1. Use a new blade
2. Don’t use thick fabric
3. Don’t put your images too close together
4. Don’t cut too fast

Do you know how I know all this?  Yup – I didn’t do any of those things and big surprise, my fabric didn’t cut very well.  I will have to try it again when I get some new blades.  So in the meantime… I cut my file again using some scrap cardstock – traced it onto my remaining fabric and cut them out by hand – UGG – Remind me to ALWAYS HAVE SPARE BLADES ON HAND! I hate to cut by hand – the Cricut has really spoiled me!!  Anyway here are my cut out flowers.

Starting with the smallest flower – fold your flower almost in half and hot glue the center together (yes I discovered that hot glue works best for this project – who knew?).  Fold the next flower the other direction and glue it to the first section.  Continue until you have just the largest flower left.  I folded this the same way as the previous flower so that the back of my flower would look uniform. I know that I didn’t describe this process very well – If anyone is interested in seeing a video of how I did this just let me know in the comments and I will make one up and get it posted.  Here is my finished flower.

I then took two strips of the green fabric and folded them over to form leaves.

I glued the two leaves onto the back of my flower.  I played around with them giving some extra tucks until I had them looking just how I wanted them.  Here is what my flower looked like when I was finished.

I wanted to add this really soft ivory lace that found – so I glued that to back of the flower.

I think it really added a lot of charm.  It was just what I was imagining!  I love it when that happens!!!

To finish up my brooch I glued the flower to a chipboard circle and attached a 1” pin backing.

I love this close-up of the brooch – I can’t believe that it turned out so close to the picture I had in my head when I started!