OLFA Art Knife: Cutting Out Flowers

Hey, everyone. My name is Emily and I have a super colorful fun project for you today. They are these colorful florals that I'm very excited to show you how to make. You can make them into a garland for maybe some sewing room decor. You can turn them into some super fun earrings or you can simply put a magnet right on the back and turn them into little magnets to hold your art projects or your fun little notes on your refrigerator or around your house. The key to making these flowers look happy and have a lot of movement to them. Is this art knife? This art knife gives you precision cutting and it will help you with the little details like the applique on the felt leaves or the little tiny um details in the flower stain and middles. And I'm gonna show you about how to do all of those. But first of all, I want to show you this art knife how to load it. And then we can get started cutting the curved blade that the Ulfa Art knife comes with is perfect for so many different fabric substrates to load the blade all you will do is simply insert the end of the blade into the closed portion of the top of the knife, give it a good twist and that knife is in place and the blade will not move, which makes our precision cutting effortless. I'm gonna grab our fabric and get started to cutting the outside of our flowers. Like I said, I'm using felt today. So I am choosing just this beautiful fua color felt. And then I'm also going to layer it with another color to add some movement to our flowers. So I'm going to choose this sort of like, I don't know lilac color if you will. And I'm gonna use two different color circles. You can use whatever circle things you have in your home. I have these uh baking dishes which work very well. I chose two circles that are kind of similar in size, but enough variety that when we kind of crunch it together, you'll have two different layers. The first circle is going to be by bigger outside circle and for each one of your flowers, you will want to cut two circles. Even if they are the same size, I am going to cut right around the outside, around here with my blade. Now to use my blade, I'm simply gonna stick my blade into my felt and work my way all the way around the outside using this as a template. Now, of course, you could trace something onto your fabric that would work just fine. I am just trying to make things quick and easy today. So it cuts, look at that cuts perfectly and so precise and my edges are not frayed and they are beautiful. So I'm gonna repeat that same process with my smaller color or my smaller circle and my next color. Whenever I'm cutting on a larger piece of fabric, I always tell people to squish to the very edge. So you can save as much fabric as possible for future projects. That's how you get a good stash going in your fabric room. So cut right around the outside. Here, it moved a little bit. There we go. And I'm gonna pull this up and now I have two circles, one larger, one smaller to get the movement on your flowers. We are essentially going to cut first a spiral right in the middle and then we're gonna add our floral details. So find about the middle. It doesn't have to be perfectly in the middle. And I like to put a poke there. So I can visually see where I want to end. Now. Any, any side that you start on is totally fine because it's a circle, right? So I'm just going to simply make a spiral right all the way into that center poke um with my blade. And the cool thing about this project is because flowers are organic in nature. Your spiral doesn't even have to be perfect. I'm just working my way around in a circle, kind of pushing down and using the, the weight of the blade as I go. And once I get near that center poke, I'm going to leave this little kind of tab if you will. So there's kind of a little circle and my poke is right there in the middle so that I can see visually. Here's my center. I start with a circle and kind of work my way out. I'm going to repeat that with my bigger circle. As you can see my spiral is not as perfect with this one, but I love that because that's what's gonna give the movement to our flower petals and then again, leave that little tab or the inner circle ready for the for us to layer our flour on top of the next step is to add dimension or the actual pedal shapes. If you were a flower connoisseur or the best gardener in the world, maybe you'd be able to identify the different pedal shapes that you want in your finished flower. I am not. So in this case, I'm just gonna give kind of a wavy moving texture to the outside edge of the entire spiral. This would be the inside edge, this is the outside edge. So along this whole outside edge, spiraling inward and again, there's no perfection to how this is done. But this knife is gonna make this movement and this sort of zig zagging or wavy ness that you're giving your pedals the movement so easy to cut, let your blade do the work for you and just move right along that outside edge. Giving it some un definition is what I guess I would say as you get towards the middle, it may look like you're adding little small waves. But if you think about the way that a flower opens, usually the biggest movement on the petals is the outside. So don't, don't worry if you feel like you're not adding enough movement, I promise you are. When we put it all together, it'll look amazing. So doesn't look like much right now, but you will end up with a spiral iy sort of shape that has wavy edges on the outside. I'm gonna repeat the same steps with my smaller inner pedal section by adding the outside, wavy edges to the outside of my spiral. So now I have two spirals, one that's bigger, one that's smaller. So the cool thing about this project is that also can bust up some of your scraps. And we all know that a lot of people have scraps in their craft room, so grab any colors of scraps that you want to use for this project. Um Or for this part of the project, I should say I do have these kind of smaller green um pieces. And then I also have here, I'm gonna use this kind of yellow for the middle. So all I'm gonna do for my middle to start with your middle. All you need is a chunk that's probably about an inch. Or if you really want kind of a, a big sort of uh vibrant center, maybe two inches long and you're gonna probably need it in three or four inches in length. So I'm going to use the amazing Ulfa rotary cutter just to cut those straight edges and the, um, straight edge here. So I'm just gonna cut off this edge chunk with the rotary cutter just that I have that to work with and then give myself straighten up this edge here. And I'm gonna make this, I'm gonna make it a little bit bigger than one inch, but this is about all we need for this. So to make my fringe, I'm actually going to change the blade on my Ulfa Art knife to the chisel blade. The chisel blade looks like this and it has a more square tip on the edge if you can see it on a more square tip. And this is really great for notching or kind of making really quick straight cuts, which is exactly what this, um, frayed edge is going to be. So this is the chisel blade and all I'm going to do is insert the chisel blade kind of straight down and kind of cut along the edge. It's that quick to make a frayed edge. And I don't know if you've ever used, done fraying on, um, with, with scissors before, but I feel like your hand goes about crazy trying to make those tiny little cuts. And I'm just telling you this makes it so quick and so easy. In a matter of a few seconds, I got all of these frayed edges and you can make fraying, um, really thin or really thick with the preciseness of this chisel blade. So I'm just gonna continue to cut my frayed edges from my center with my chisel blade until it is all cut and frayed. You can even hear the knife going through the thick felt. And I have this beautiful kind of organic frayed inside center. I'm going to change my art blade back to my curved edge blade, give that a good titan and for my um leave detail. So you can choose to make your leaves as big or as small as you want. But I like to make a leaf shape just kind of a, you know, normal loop, leap shaped leaf shape. And then these veins are what I'm gonna cut as a detail. So this is where your scraps kind of come into play. The color that I want to make my leaf today is this sort of dark green color. So I'm just going to draw with a pen or a pencil or a chalk marker or a fabric pen. Just a quick kind of leaf shape can be as big or small. The one thing I will tell you if you can see the shape is you wanna make your stem bigger than a normal leaf stem just so that you have some substance to glue to the back of your um the back of your flower. So simply cut this out, using your blade and using the blade work for you. And now I want to add the detail. I'm gonna use this light green color just because I think it looks really fun. Um And basically I'm just gonna cut a chunk that is about the same size as my leaf. And I'm going to with my pen again, this is what makes it really fun and it sort of creative because you can make this as detailed or as not detailed as you want. And I'm going to make my vein kind of shapes or shape that would go, you know, roughly in my leaf. Now, this is where the precision of this knife really comes into play. I want to um just like you were making bubble letters as a kid, right? In art class, you're gonna kind of make a bubble leaf vein because you want it to be thick enough so that we can applicate it onto the leaf itself. So I'm going to imagine that I, I have a thick line around where I just drew my vein shapes and simply cut apart and cut away all of the areas like you're making bubble letters like as, as a kid. But leaving the part that I drew in the middle and if you have, if you, the lines that we drew are not going to matter because these are going to be um the underside of the leaf veins. So don't worry about that. So I now have my leaf vein shape. The vein is going to be a little bit bigger than the leaf itself. And that is totally OK. I like to leave it and not cut my edges until after I have applicated, which we are going to move to our sewing machine. Next, we are going to bring our leaf, our vein, our two spiral pieces and our steam and middle to our sewing machine to get stitching. So we're going to be doing two different techniques on our sewing machine. Today. The first one is just a traditional more applique or straight stitch to add the veins to our leaves. And then the second one is a gathering stitch which is essentially just in a long gated straight stitch so that we can gather our spirals and our center stamen areas. So grab your sewing machine. So grab your sewing machine and I'm just gonna do a straight stitch along the veins. You can choose to applicate, you can choose to do a zig zag stitch. But I want to simply just add the veins with a straight stitch. And I like seeing my stitching right on top when you come to these corners, just be sure to put your foot down and pivot the foot of your sewing machine. And I like to go straight across with these other vein details. So come right to the center, leave your needle down, lift your foot, pivot and then keep going if you choose to use coordinating threads so that you can't see the thread totally fine. I love seeing the stitching on these sort of details. So I just left a white thread in, I guess I could have done like a fluorescent pink or something. But this is fun nonetheless. So it's really that simple. You can choose if you chose to do like a zig zag stitch or something more complicated, totally fine. But this is just a simple applique or, or attaching this vein right onto the background of the, the leaf shape and we'll get this all trimmed up in a minute. But I'm to move on to our gathering stitch and all a gathering stitch is, is a straight stitch that is really elongated. So you can gather it together and kind of pull it to give the fluff or the movement to the flower pedals because essentially we're going to be wrapping those flower pedals kind of around each other. I want to add my stitch across the bottom or the straight part of the spiral. Remember we gave the zigzag or movement with our Ulfa art knife to the outside of the spiral. I wanna add that straight stitch right here to the inside of the spiral all the way to the middle, following the line that we initially cut when we made the spiral. So on your sewing machine, whether it's a dial or it's a push, push touch screen like mine, all you will want to do is go into the details of your straight stitch and a long gate, your stitch as much as you can. I'm just pushing my buttons up and I can see visually the stitch moving to make it elongated. Um My straight stitch starts at 2.5. I'm going to go all the way up to four. Now, you can choose whatever you feel like is best and maybe your sewing machine has a gathering stitch option. Mine does not. So I'm just elongating my straight stitch. I like to start on the outside. The one thing I do want to tell you is give yourself kind of a long tail because sometimes my machine cuts really close to make sure you have a long tail because that's what we will be pulling. And all I'm going to do is slowly work my way along the straight edge. I'm kind of uns spiraling over here with one hand and feeding my um fabric through with my other hand and just, it's the closer to the straight edge. And as you get towards the middle, it's a little bit trickier so you can slow down and then just stop. Don't cut it first, lift up your foot and your needle and I like to pull a good amount out so that you have an extra kind of tail before you clip your threads. Set that aside and we're going to repeat the same process with our other spiral shape. Lift up your foot, lift up your needle, give yourself quite a bit of extra thread and set this other spiral aside. I will do the same gathering stitch along the bottom again, along the same area that is uncut from our Ulfa art knife along the bottom or the straight edge of my statement or middle section, lift up my foot, lift up my needle, give myself extra thread. We are done at our sewing machine so you can move that aside and we will get to gathering and assembling our flower next. So we're gonna start assembling our flowers. The first thing we wanna do is trim up the excess that we have all this outer edge that we have on our leaf. So I'm gonna grab the cutting mat and my art knife and just give this a quick trim right along the outside edge where the vein of the leaf meets the outside edge and trim up any thread that you have. Our leaf is complete. So move your cutting that out of the way and we are going to start gathering or making the flowers come to life. So when you do a gathering stitch on your sewing machine. You will have a top and a bottom thread, right. Just like you have your top thread, you thread the top of your sewing machine and you have your bottom thread. I like to grab. It's kind of hard to tell. But you'll notice that one of the threads. I believe it's the top thread. You will be able to pull a little bit. So there's two threads right here at the top and the bottom thread. And if you separate them, you can slowly pull not the thread, but rather you're kind of moving the fabric down. See this where I'm moving the fabric down and it's starting to gather, you'll want to be careful that you don't pull too hard because you don't want to snap your thread that you have just sewn. If you do, you can simply put it right back in your sewing machine. But all I did was gather it together and now it just looks a little bit scrunchy, which means that when I put it all together, it gives it kind of, it doesn't just squish it together like a ball like this. But when I put it together, it kind of has this sort of burst or movement to it, which is exactly what we're going for. And I think the key to that is using this gathering stitch on your sewing machine, repeat those steps for both of your spirals. So find one of the edges, separate the thread, the top and bottom thread and begin to gather your fabric. Now, just like you're gathering or pulling anything through, um, fabric, you'll want to kind of work your way down. I don't want to just scrunch really, really, really hard, but rather I'm kind of working my way down as I'm scrunching. That's, that makes it kind of like a gentle squeeze or gentle scrunch. Once I get about halfway, I'll flip it over and go to the other side. See one side is gathered and now I'm gonna do the same. Find my top thread and bottom thread, separate them and just keep kind of gathering. So it's a little hard to see once it all kind of gets gathered. But this is my spiral so you can unwind it and see kind of how gathered it is who this guy kind of came undone down here. There we go. So that's done. My inside is done. My leaf is ready and I'm gonna gather my big spiral. Here we go, separate my threads. You can always go back and forth from each side. I like to make sure that my inner piece, my smaller spiral is a little bit more gathered than my outer spiral. And the reason is, as you'll see in the next couple of steps when we layer these together, um while you want the sort of gathering to match or kind of match, if you will. You also want to make sure that your inner spiral has um more kind of space or room to go around that outer spiral as we're layering them together. So don't worry if one of them ends up a little bit more gathered than the other. So this one, see I'm kind of pulling a little bit tighter. You can already see that these sort of look like leaves or um pedals, leaf, uh flower petals because it adds movement to it. I love watching this come to life. OK? I am nearing my gathering to be done here. So I have my outer spiral, which was my bigger spiral and I have my smaller spiral right here. So all I'm gonna do is locate my center. Remember that center little tab where we kind of put our notch on and I'm going to layer these two on top of each other before I do that though. Let's trim up this extra thread and get rid of it. It may feel a little scary to trim this up because you might think, oh my word, I'm losing the gathering um pole that I just did, but that's OK because we're gonna glue it all together and it will be awesome and it'll stay in place from the glue. So I have my gun right here and I am going to add a dab of glue for these tabs to kind of layer on top of each other. The first thing I wanna do is add on my um center sort of steam area. So trim your threads. And before I spiral, I still want to add my, my tabs. But before I spiral, I am going to just add a little dab of glue and, and um from, from the beginning and end of my little kind of burst and then all I'm gonna do is put this right here on top of my tab so that you have your center area. So a little bit of glue and look at it bursts out as opposed to kind of just like a dab right in the middle. Now, I am going to kind of layer my flower and go right around that center. So if you imagine a flower opening, you'll obviously will have the center and the flower will kind of burst. You can kind of be burst out from the center and that's the movement we want to do. So every little bit I'm gonna add a dab of glue as I'm wrapping both my center and my outer spiral around the inner stamen area or inner iris area or whatever you wanna call that inner area. Now, as you're, as you're gluing and as you're wrapping, you'll notice that your spiral kind of wants to turn, do your very best to make sure that straight edge, that edge, that we didn't use the art knife to make the petals with that, that straight edge is the edge that you're putting down towards the base of the flower. Because you want that movement that we added with our art knife to kind of show through with the um the petals that we made and look at. You can kind of see this double layer flower coming together. See, and I'm telling you the movement with the petals along with the gathering is the combo to make sure that these flowers look and feel so beautiful and kind of realistic in my opinion, when you get to the end. So the middle is going to end a lot sooner than this edge part. All you want to do is kind of tuck that in and secure it kind of right in the middle there and push it down and then you'll finish wrapping outside of your flower, look at it's looking really cool and then do the same and kind of end your gathered flour by tucking that end kind of underneath. So inevitably, this looks, I I kind of am smushing the middle as I'm gluing it all together. So I have to up the middle a little bit more. But inevitably you will have an area see how it looks like there's more petals on or more. Um Yeah, petals to the flower on one side, I like to add my leaf then to the opposite side, you can kind of see that with the flowers I have on, on my ears here, but I want to add my leaf kind of to the underbelly of this by just simply doing a dab of glue right on the underbelly and then adding my leaf to kind of come out to the side. Now you have your flower done. If you want to make this into a garland for maybe your art, art room or your craft room. I would recommend kind of assembly lining all of these processes. The one change that you only have to make is to add a little tab onto the back so that you can thread the um the, the thread or the string or the ribbon through. I hope this project has inspired you to turn your flowers into earrings or a fun garland or even some magnets or bouquet of flowers to send to your family or friends. And I hope you get excited about this art knife and its precise cutting to make these felt flowers absolutely perfect and blooming.