Ever felt too daft to craft???

The other day, I saw a wonderful tutorial for making singed chiffon roses on one of my favourite blogs, Robin's Egg Blues. The tutorial was so good and made it look fairly easy, I just had to try it, just had to.

So I wombled off into town on Friday and bought a couple of bits of chiffon. Saturday, I got out a little tealight candle, pinned my petal templates to the ever-shifting chiffon and cut them out. Lit the candle. Snuffed the candle, because I had of course forgotten to find the long handled tweezers. First aid box raided, I relit the candle, picked up the first petal and singed away! Woohoo, I thought, this is not at all bad. 10 minutes, slightly crisped fingers and lots of singed petals later, I was ready to assemble a flower. Ah, errmm, that turned out to be not quite as easy as I had thought. Chiffon is darned slippery and even with singed edges, it has a life of its own. And don't even think about breathing when you are trying to pile up chiffon petals in a rose shape! The slightest bit of huff puff and they end up everywhere, lol. In the end, I gave up on pre-sewing assembly and pushed the sewing needle through each petal separately, sort of arranging them into a flower shape as I went along.

Hmmm. It looked lopsided. It didn't look much like the gorgeous roses on Robin's Egg Blues' tutorial. I had a close look at my petals, and discovered that I didn't do that good a job of singeing either, sigh. There were many un-singed edges, merrily fraying away, grrr. You don't even have to look very closely at the photographs to see them, lolol -


Undeterred by this dismal failure, I tried again. Ouch, metal gets hot when held over a candle, even long handled tweezers. I was determined not to have any fraying edges on my petals this time though. Good plan. Bad execution. I think I may have overdone the singeing just a tad, lol, my petals are very curly -

So now I am sitting here, looking at this pile of supercurly chiffon petals, trying to tell myself that yes, it is worth assembling them into another flower. I am not convinced, sigh. I really feel daft, I mean, come on, it can't be that difficult to find just the right level of singe, can it? Perhaps I am just overenthusiastic with my singeing. One thing I know though, I need a heck of a lot more practice, lololol. Watch this space.

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