At the summer festival for our local community of Westbury Park in Bristol, England, Heart Space Studios held a day long drop-in session to make felt flowers – for all ages – and all ages came and made masses of flowers and went away wearing them.

I spent a few days making samples and developing patterns, getting supplies of felt and pre-cut flower shapes from the Craft Department, the one- stop on line shop for lots of  interesting and exciting craft materials. The younger children of 4,5 and 6 years are not really able to cut and stitch all the little petal shapes so we provided lots of odd buttons and felt shapes

and I had been given some strange pom poms from Aza Adlam, who is a member  of our Wednesday Knit and Stitching club – they proved very popular after Poppy, my young volunteer had sampled a few and found out how to use them.

I had designed several shapes for different abilities and tastes, the simple daisies were popular with the  younger children – even a few boys got in on the act….

The pom poms proved the most popular of all the styles for  hair clips for girls…

  and many children managed to make a couple of flowers in a very short time.

Meanwhile, for the more assured stitchers and one adventurous man, the spiral ruched flower was a quite a challenge.

these flowers are rather more sophisticated and a lot more fiddly to make well.

The gathering threads on the interior spiral are simple to stitch, but manipulating them into something lovely is not so easy

the choice of colours here is all important…..

trimming the petals later helps to retain a good even flower shape

lots of the finished  flowers were worn with pride for the journey home, by parents who had joined in seeing how successful their children had been…..

and other grown-ups who were all very colour co-ordinated