My DIY Fabric Flower Sash Tutorial

Last week I shared some DIY Flower Sash tutorials & inspiration. Last week I went to work, attempting to make one myself, to dress up a little black dress I was planning on wear for a wedding I was attending.

For today’s DIY Wednesday post – I thought it would be fun to share how my fabric floral belt came together – and add my own DIY tutorial with how I ended up making it!

How to make a DIY Fabric Flower Belt or Sash

First, using the research I did the previous week, I ended up using a combination of these two DIY Fabric Flower Sash tutorials. One from Monkey See Monkey Do and the other from Bromeliad.

Materials:

• long strips of fabric [approx 4 inches wide and ranging in length depending on size of your flowers]
• scissors
• needle & thread
• hot glue & hot glue gun
• card stock
• ribbon
• industrial velcro

Because my fabric strips weren’t long enough – I cut three out and sewed two together so that I could end  up with one larger flower and one smaller flower:

This is a shot of my extra long piece – it was probably 3-4 feet long [sorry I didn’t measure!!]

Next, fold the fabric strip in half and hand sew thread across the bottom, along the cut edges. I made loops of about one inch:

As you sew you will start to see that the fabric strip will begin to bunch up. This is OK! This is supposed to happen to make the fabric eventually form a flower.

Here is a shot of the final sewn fabric:

The next part I struggled with BIG time. This was taking the sewn fabric [above] and forming it into something that looked like a rose or flower. I ended up taking one end, and sort of just gathering the fabric in a circular pattern. This make take some practice and a couple tries!

Once I had something that faintly resembled a fabric rose, I went to town with hot glue. I cut a piece of card stock into a small square, threw some hot glue on it and delicately placed my fabric flower onto the square.

From there I added more hot glue into the flower to make sure it was all going to stick/stay in place on the card stock.

I trimmed the card stock a bit so that you couldn’t see it. Then I hot glued the two flowers to the end of a piece of purple, satin ribbon.

Then I used industrial velcro to finish off the belt. [A lot of other tutorials just tied the belt into a bow at the end – I thought about buttons or snaps, but had the velcro on hand, so I just used that. I think I might go back and use snaps instead :) – FYI]

I measured the ribbon around my waist and then SNIP, I cut the end and place the other piece of velcro there.

And VOILA! A beautiful hot pink fabric flower sash that added a bit of modern whimsy to my little black dress! I thought they ended up matching the shoes pretty well too! You could easily make this DIY fabric flower belt to snazz up a dress or even to snazz up your bridesmaids dresses!

Enjoy!