Spruced up cardigan

Here's the finished product. I liked the pale pink sweater that I found for pretty cheap from Old Navy but I felt like it needed a little something extra; enter some felt flower embellishment. (I can see now that I should have taken my sweater out of the dryer before it got all wrinkly. I think it's still pretty cute though.)

A few weeks ago I bought these shoes at Payless and I was inspired by the cute flowers on the toes.

I have seen lots of fun felt flower ideas on multiple blogs recently and thought I would make some of my own. It was super simple too and very quick; just the right project to complete while one little boy took a nap. I looked through the clip-art available in Microsoft Word (I know, what a strange place to look for a template for crafts, but it totally worked for this). Once I found a flower I liked I made several copies (again, in Word) and scaled them so the largest was 3" in diameter. I scaled down the rest of my copies by 1/2" from the previous size. 

 When I cut out all of my templates I was ready to cut them out of my felt. I liked the contrast of the bluish-lavender colored felt and the pale pink of the sweater. I wanted more of a pop than tone-on-tone flowers offered. I stacked and re-stacked my layers until I was happy with how the flowers looked.  When I was satisfied, I glued all the layers together using Fabri-Tac permanent adhesive since it's washable.

Originally I planned to use all six of the sizes to create my flower, but once I stacked them I decided it was too much. For the large flower I ended up using the five biggest flowers and for the smaller flower I used the four smallest sizes. When the glue between the layers was dry I was ready to add the centers. I just used a few glass beads that I had on hand and stitched them on making sure to go through the layers for added support. (I have a small baby around so I don't need to be dropping anything small, glass, and swallow-able onto the floor.) After adding the centers, I was ready to glue the finished flowers to my sweater. I pinned them in place until I liked the placement. I thought the flowers looked better when slightly overlapped. I glued them to the sweater using the same glue as before.

The finished product has been successfully washed and dried and everything is still in place. And now I have a spruced up cardigan to wear since I'm not wearing  necklaces anymore due to a strangulation hazard (from the baby strangling me when he tries to rip the necklace off my throat).