Midnight Crafting Leads To....

...bursts of creativity that I would not have otherwise harnessed during the day.  LOL Sometimes the creativity leads to something that I look at and say, "Right.  That didn't turn out the way I imagined in my head" and then into the trash it goes.  Other times, the creativity leads to something that I look at and say, "Totally cute!" and then I keep on crafting the same thing until 4am not realizing how late it is.

I had one of those nights last night where I was desperately trying to "perfect" the rolled rose that looked more realistic than the flat shabby chic ones I usually make.  I always wondered how other crafters were able to get that tight "realistic" looking rolled rose that almost looks good enough to eat.  With cramped hands, 1 glue gun stick, and two (!) hours later, I made these lovelies:

Dusty Rose

Sage Green Rose Brooch

Considering it took me two hours of tight rolling and glueing to make these cute little lovelies, I'm hoping that with more practice, I will twist, roll, and glue my way to 15-minute rolled roses, sans cramping hands!

The other lovely I tried was a rolled ruffle flower courtesy of Make It Do's Ribbon Flower Pin Tutorial.  I had tried doing this a few months ago, but gave up.  I kept losing my thread in the process, breaking it, and then messing up the ruffling of the flower.  I even tried using my sewing machine where in the process of trying to do a simple basic stitch, jammed my machine and broke my needle.  After all that I did finish it, but the final product did not resemble the nice delicate looking flower on the tutorial.  Rather, it looked like, well, a bunch of bunched up ribbon.  Needless to say, I put that particular project aside.  I thought I'd give it another shot using the same ruffling technique, but with silk strips hand sewn together.  The process worked much better for me and I am pretty satisfied with what came of it:

Silk Flower in Neutral Cream

I added a hand-made custom bronze silk button to compliment the neutrals in the silk fabric to finish off the look.  This was also the first time I used a french clip and discovered that it works pretty well when securing a hair clip to a pony tail or french twist.  The slip really grabs the hair with no slippage.

I love midnight crafting--there is something about those late (or early) morning hours that relaxes me and allows me to just "go with it".  It also gives me some of that special time to reflect on the day's events and send prayers of thanks to God for blessing me with the time to do what I love to do.  That's probably what makes me get lost in late night crafting, but in a good way!

'Til the next project, Happy Crafting!