Fancy Bits

This Wednesday, while taking a break from my more typical sewing projects (skirts and shirts mainly as of late) I grabbed a bag of scrap fabrics I scored at MECCA--Materials Exchange Center for Community Arts--and started messing around with some of the fabric pieces. It appeared as though someone had abandoned what he or she'd been working on mid-project. There were oval shapes cut from various silks and silky fabrics in awesome contrasting solids and prints pinned together in batches of 5 or 6. I really liked the color combinations of the pinned ovals so I decided to work with them.

The bottom right corner shows one I made with dark green blue and paisley silks.

The pieces were kind of like flower petals so, I experimented arranging them on a piece of fabric to form a shape suggestive of a lotus, one of my favorite flower shapes. Then, I did a basic applique, sewing the ovals in the desired shape onto the square of base fabric. I originally had in mind to make a patch, however, after sewing it didn't lay flat as I would've liked it. So I cut it out and began to see how it not only looked like a lotus flower, it also was very reminiscent of butterfly wings or even feathers. I hand sewed a couple matching vintage buttons, hot glued it to a new but salvaged headband and viola!

Me modeling the 1st Fancy Bits headbands

A unique and fancy bit of head decoration. I am pleased with the results; its retro, sort of flapper-ish, sort of burlesque/carnivalesque and it was entirely made from salvaged and scrap materials. I didn't record the process for the 1st one I made, but below are a few pictures from ones that followed.