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Kanzashi in Bloom Book Review And Giveaway

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Kanzashi in Bloom by Diane Gilleland

What is Kanzashi?

The term Kanzashi refers to elaborate hair ornaments worn by women in Japan. They originated around 1600. Check out wikipedia for more information.

This book is filled with fabric folding techniques to create the basic flower which can then be turned into many many different projects. Including jewelry and much much more. You are only going to be limited by your imagination.

The photos are amazing and you are left digging around in your fabric stash for something to get started with.

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–Win Win Win—

We have 2 copies of this wonderful books for you to win. For your chance to win please enter the competition here.

Competition is open -Worldwide

Competition closes – 1st of August

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Comments

  8. Kanzashi is so much fun – and it is really simple and easy once you get the basic principles down. That book is amazing as well – I have it on order.

Have you read?

Make Your Cross Stitch into an Iron On Patch

A while back I made a little rainbow cross stitch pattern and I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do with it, so I turned it into a patch. My idea was that it could be used on a jacket or backpack, or you could add a pin to the back and wear it temporarily on a shirt or elsewhere. 

But what if you want to make your design more permanent? Is it possible to turn a piece of cross stitch into an iron-on design?

It turns out yes, it is, and Sirious Stitches has done it so I didn’t have to try to figure it out on my own. 

The way they did it was by using HeatnBond, an iron-on adhesive that attaches fabrics without sewing. There was still sewing involved to finish the edges of the cross stitch fabric and make it look like a purchased patch. The post shows how to do this by hand or with your sewing machine. (I just did blanket stitch edging on mine, which doesn’t look like a “real” patch but is also a lot faster.)

Once you have the patch prepared it’s a pretty easy matter of using the fusible adhesive to the back of the patch so you can then iron it onto whatever jacket, pair of jeans, bag or whatever else you might want to add it to. 

I guess I’m a little paranoid about the washability of cross stitch projects, though you could hand wash anything with an iron-on cross stitch patch as you might need to with a purchased iron-on patch, anyway. But this does look really cool and is a great option if you know you want to permanently add a cross stitch patch to a garment of bag. 

Get the full tutorial over at Sirious Stitches. Would you add an iron-on cross stitch patch to something? I’d love to hear what you would use this technique for!

[Photo: Sirious Stitches]