You Don’t Need a Green Thumb to Make Fabric Roses Bloom

Velvet, lace, ruffles and brocade not enough to satisfy your taste for ornamentation? Then gild the Edwardian-dandy look further, as craftsperson Evelyn Wilson likes to do, by adding a Victorian fabric rose to your ensemble. She pins the roses to lace blouses, floppy felt or straw hats, brocade vests, and velvet and suede pumps.

Wilson, who teaches classes in Victorian rose making at Piecemakers in Costa Mesa, uses French fabric ribbon for her roses because the thread-thin wire along its edges makes it easy to shape. French ribbon is available in most crafts shops.

You’ll need about two yards for a rose. Choose a ribbon 1 to 1 1/2 inches wide with some stiffness.

1. Begin by laying the ribbon out flat and bending down one end. This mitered section will be the stem of the rose and should be about 1 1/2 inches long. Fold the stem in half lengthwise.

2. Next, create the center bud of the rose. Hold the stem near its base and begin twisting counterclockwise. As you twist, the length of the ribbon will wrap around the upper portion of the stem in a tight rosette. When you have created a bud that pleases you, stitch in to the base of the stem to hold it in place.

3. Gather the remaining length of ribbon. You can do this by hand-sewing a continuous running stitch along the lower edge of the ribbon starting from the stem. (Sew as close to the wire as possible and use quilting thread, says Wilson.) Or you can open the ribbon at the bottom edge at the opposite end and pull out the wire to gather up the fabric.

4. Pin the bud to a piece of felt to anchor it, then mold the gathered ribbon around it into a loose rosette.

5. Unpin the bud and attach to the felt permanently using needle or thread. Or use a low-temperature glue gun, as Wilson does. (She uses a Low-Temper.) Then glue or stitch down each petal to the one below.

6. Fine-tune your rose. If it’s smaller than desirable, gather an additional piece of ribbon and add to the rosette. If a section of your rose looks skimpy because your gathering stitches weren’t close enough, cut off small pieces of ribbon, gather, and insert as individual petals where needed.

Variations

For an antique-looking rose that looks like you unearthed it from a Victorian trunk, deliberately rumple up the ribbon before you begin shaping it. (Most of the roses you see here were “antiqued.”) Beginning at one end of the ribbon, bunch up a few inches at a time and press in the wrinkles with a steam iron. Continue to the other end. For color variation within your rose, choose a bicolored ribbon. Lay it out with the bud color toward the top--usually the lighter shade. Create a bud, as described above, then do a reverse miter fold to bring the darker color to the top for the remainder of the rose. Add individual petals of the lighter color if you want more variation.