Crochet flower brooches

I have another little fundraising endeavour going on at church at the moment and I have been using my new newly acquired skill of crochet to make some flower corsage brooches. They have been very well received and I am taking orders for Christmas presents.

The great thing about these is the wool I've been using. It's called "Wash and Filz it" and it's a washing machine felting wool. So I make a wobbly flower with my novice crocheting and then pop it in the washing machine and it tightens up and becomes all neat - hurray!

The larger flower comes from a pattern from the Mollie Makes magazine, with a covered button in the centre. I have been pinning the brooches onto a piece of card as it seems to make them look a bit more finished, and I think it will help to look like a nicer present to give someone.

I'm afraid I can't really link to the pattern I'm using for the roses as I'm fairly sure I've been doing it badly - it's all to do with the difference between American and English crochet patterns. However it seems to work and look quite nice so I'm sticking with it!

Shopping around

I am looking into starting up a new creative group at my church and so I wanted to start with a little fundraising. I looked into printed T-towels and cotton shopping bags but our church isn't big enough to support the numbers required and it would have been a big outlay for a tiny profit. I got thinking and I was particularly inspired by a pattern for a shopping bag in an issue Mollie Makes.

I have been loving free machine embroidery and I re-watched a tutorial that appeared on Kirstie's Homemade Home about sewing through tracing paper and I came up with this design for a church bag to sell. One thing I like about this is I only have to make one to start with and I'm going to take orders if other people would like to buy one.

You can see the stitching a bit closer up here. I finished the design with a little fabric paint and I printed our church logo onto some special fabric that can be run through the printer and is then washable from Crafty Computer Paper.

It folds up so nicely too...