Mystery Solved: Ric Rac Roses

by Sister-Diane on May 14, 2009

in Crafty Community, Oddball Crafts

Ah, the joys of being in a community of crafty minds!

A couple days ago, I asked for some help figuring out how these ric rac flowers were made.

Astaryth shared this link, and Alice shared this link. Both are pretty ric rac flowers, but not quite the same as these. As you can see in the photo below, the bottom of my flowers is flat. How did they do that?

Then Alice mentioned “reverse engineering” in her comment. And it finally dawned on me: DUH! I could take one apart and see how it’s made! Yeah, I know – forest for the trees, Baby.

So, I grabbed a flower. It was held together at the bottom with glue. I pulled it apart.

Here it is unrolled. And there’s the secret!

The ric rac was folded in half first, pressed, and then rolled up!

Pretty amazing – there’s no stitching or glue holding the flower together along the way – just a spot of glue at the bottom to anchor the end of the ric rac.

. . . And now we all know. :-)

Bookmark and Share
  • Very cool! Isn't is so often the way, that something that appears to be complicated, is often very simple!
  • And know is half the battle!

    *cough* Sorry, had a childhood Saturday morning flashback there. I'm so going to have to make some of those now!
  • Ha! How cool.
  • LOL! duh! It's just too easy to look for things on the internet. Reverse engineering was the easiest and best way. In the pre-internet days, this would have been the first thought. My Mom & Grandmother rarely used patterns for anything when I was a kid. They could look at a crochet (Mom) or Sewn (G-mother) object and then sit down at home and re-create it, often without even having the object in front of them. One of my favorite afghans to crochet is done using a 'pattern' from my mother that she passed down to me. It is one of those 'mile-a-minute' afghans. I remember asking mom how to do it and then writing down on an index card what she told me from memory so I could duplicate it.
  • genius! those little roses are too cute.
  • good to know! I can never figure out what to do with ric rac but I'm going to have to try this :)
  • those are really beautiful. I wish ric rac wasn't so obscenely expensive (here? maybe everywhere?).
  • Okay, this is absolutely cool. I am doing this this weekend. I love crafts that are simple in design and materials, and also beautiful. I will exercise this project between throwing paint around.

    (We'll see what kind of colors bleed from my hands to the ric-rac)
  • futuregirl
    Wow! Even easier than I thought! Too cool!
blog comments powered by Disqus

Previous post:

Next post: