How to make a Ribbon Rosette (tutorial)

I should honestly name this How to NOT make a Ribbon Rosette, because I made about 4 million mistakes before I found something that would qualify in the category of “working”. After all these mistakes, which undoubtedly you have been there if you found this post, i thought it would be beneficial to share what didn’t work (atleast for me), but perhaps inspire you to try a new direction.

Here are my attempts to make a variety of Rosettes, although if you want a simpler craft, you can try my how to make a tutu instead! Working with tulle was so much easier than ribbon. HA!

GET A VARIETY OF COLORED ZIPPERS FOR THIS CRAFT!

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How to make a Zipper Rosette

Materials:

Floral Wire
Zipper
Hot Glue

Step #1: This step is going to be firm with all the Rosettes you make. After the obvious of cutting the zipper in half, you will begin by securing an end piece to your wire and begin wrapping.

Step #2: Wrap the zipper around, dotting at the baseline, gather and stick. This is where I went wrong. My zipper was WAY too small and I ran out of length before I even had a rose.

Step #3: I took the remainder zipper size and began looping a figure eight around it to make petals. This gave me a half a flower. So there you have it….Half Flower Zipper Rosette.

*cough*

#Poor Preparation FAIL

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How to make Grosgrain Ribbon Flower Rosette Thing

My next thoughts were that I had massive amounts of grosgrain ribbon and how I could put it to usage making a Rosette. Grosgrain is very stiff ribbon, but its also bulky when you are talking about a soft petaled flower, so I was unsure how it was going to work.

Materials Used

7/8th inch grosgrain
Floral Wire
Hot Glue

Step #1: Same theory. You have to fold it and start it on the wire, then start wrapping.

Step #2: Instead of just doing a straight wrap around, I decided to pink together some of the ribbon in lengths of about 1.5 inches so when I folded the petals I had a flat surface to hot glue back onto the flower. I also thought this would make my petals a lot more even.

Notsomuch.

(I showed some flowers at the end which I did NOT make because I thought you could cut those and include on the center of your flower as seen below)

(don’t worry, I wont subject her to Kindergarten humiliation with this flower)

#All Kinds of Messed Up Fail

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How to make a Silk Ribbon Rosette

At this point, not ready to be defeated by a piece of ribbon, I decided to wrap the ribbon the way a floral expert would. That means no hot glue…just fold and wrap, fold and wrap. At the end you are supposed to secure it with ribbon (or wrap a thread) at the bottom.

I imagine this works really well with ribbon that has silk and acetate as part of its ingredients, but not on straight silk 1.5 inch ribbon like I attempted. It kept coming unraveled no matter how hard I held onto it.

That’s as far as I got.

#Too Hard for my Fingers to Hold Onto FAIL

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But I am done showing you the fails. I actually had one #success today. Its basically how to make a ribbon rosette that would be good for a headband or hairbow.

No Sew Ribbon Rosette Tutorial

Supplies needed:

Felt
Ribbon
Button, Flower, or other centerpiece
pen + cup
Patience

Step #1: I used a cup to define two pieces of felt, traced, and cut out. Then I hot glued the 2 pieces of felt together. I wanted to have a good firm base.

Step #2: I decided that instead of creating a center, I would use something that was already together as the middle. I had some flowers on hand, so I used those and hot glued a flower to the center of my felt.

I was accomplished. Nothing was falling apart yet.

Step #3: Starting my ribbon on the flower, I hot glued the first piece to the flower and began twisting and wrapping, twisting and wrapping and kept going and going and going until I got a size I wanted.

Then I cut the base and the ribbon, secured, and Voila!

#WIN WIN WIN!

Depending on how tight you twist and wrap, you can really dictate the shape of the flower as you go. As you can see all three of my flowers turned out differently depending on how loose or tight I wrapped and how much twisting or folding I did on the ribbon. I also secured with hot glue as I went because I did not want to take the risk of it coming undone.

(two!!)

Once I had three flowers done, I hot glued side by side and then hot glued the bottom felt to a French Clip Barrette.

So that might have been tutorial overkill, but atleast you know I am just like you…trial and error. As I come up with new ways (and easier ones!) to do this, Ill update this post. A friend of mine also did a tutorial on rosettes and included a rosette video! Head on over for some visual learning…..