Remember this post where I showed you how to make adorable satin flowers?   Well, I love those little flowers so much because they can add cute touches to anything from hair, to clothing, to home accessories, to purses, to gift packages.  To be honest, though, they are a bit small to add a lot of WOW to a room.  You know the theory that “bigger is better”?  Well, it is if we are talking about bigger budgets, bigger backyards, bigger pieces of chocolate cake.  Bigger thighs?  Maybe not so much.  An-y-way.  I thought that I could take this idea of making satin flower up a notch and make one, well, bigger.  The process was pretty much the same except I added more layers.  Eleven, to be exact:

For a base, I covered a circle shaped pieced of cardboard with fabric (to keep it pretty) to add stability:

Of course I glued the flower layers to the ugly side so the bottom looks nice and finished.

This finished flower turned out to be about 8 1/2 inches wide.  Big enough to make a statement in a frame that I backed with unpainted textured wallpaper:

I thought that it turned out pretty good, and I’ll admit that I excitedly thought,  “I MADE that!” every time that I walked past it.    The above picture just doesn’t do it justice.  The satin is so beautiful and I love the color that the fabric turns when the flame melts the edges.   Come to my house sometime and you will see.

After I had walked past it a hundred times or more I got thinking again.  Dangerous!  I adopted a new theory, ” If bigger is better, gigantic is the best!”.  Are you with me?

I looked in my fabric stash and found this lovely blouse that had been purchased and cut up for my daughter’s school project last year.  This little number set me back probably $.50.  Way cheaper than fabric store fabric.  I didn’t want to ruin good fabric if my big idea didn’t work.

I totally know what you are thinking.  “How could you cut up such an stylish blouse?”  I know, right?

As I started cutting I realized something awesome, this 100% polyester fabric tears really easily.  In no time at all I had a large stack of fabric squares.  The largest squares were cut out of the back of the blouse, but I was amazed at how much fabric was in each sleeve.  I didn’t even try to count how many layers this flower has.   I just know it was a lot because I wanted my gigantic flower to be nice and fluffy.

Using the same process that I showed you in my Super Simple Satin Flower tutorial I started melting my edges.  Unfortunately, my hubby was working at home when I made this and I knew that he would not welcome the thought of me putting fabric over a flame in the house so I did it on my front porch.  Trust me, it is much faster to do indoors.  Every little breeze makes the candle flicker.

I made a cool little video to show you a way that I found to speed up the process, but ding-dang-dong, I can’t for the life of me figure out how to add it in WordPress.  I will keep trying to figure out how to add the video, but basically, just take one side and simply fanfold the edges (maybe a 4-6 inch section) and hold the fanned area vertically about the candle’s hot spot to melt a larger section at a time.  Quickly spread out the fanned out area just in case parts fused together and then melt any sections that might have been missed.  Again, don’t put the fabric IN the flame, just OVER the flame.  We are melting, not burning the edges.  It probably took me an hour to melt all of my edges.

Once all of your pieces are melted, start stacking, largest on the bottom and work your way to the top.  Many of my pieces were similar in size and that is okay.   Just do this:

See how I put the glue down and scrunched the fabric to make sure the layers beneath can be seen.  This also adds wrinkles which help add volume.

When I got to the center area, I took 4 of my smaller melted shapes, pulled the center down to form a cone shape and glued them down to hide all of the hot glue spots.  At this point, I still had some extra melted fabric sections so I folded them in half and glued in the bare areas.

Ta-dah!  This baby is about 14 inches across!  It’s gigantic!

Here, you can see how I added it to a throw pillow:

And here I attached it to a framed mirror:

In all honesty, this bright blue doesn’t go with anything in my house, BUT, my daughter is going away to BYU this fall and this BYU Blue gigantic flower will go with her.  Now that I know that it IS possible to make a Gigantic Satin Flower, I’m making one for me!

So, whadda-ya think?  Was my $.50 investment + 1 1/2 hours of my time worth it?

(Here is a different blouse makeover project that I made)