To all who mourn in Israel, He will give a crown of beauty for ashes, a joyous blessing instead of mourning, festive praise instead of despair. In their righteousness, they will be like great oaks that the LORD has planted for his own glory. Isaiah 61:3

Tuesday, October 9, 2012

DIY Frog Tutorial.....

The closures on the fabulous wool suit are really neat-o frogs.  I want to keep to the spirit of this outfit as closely as I can, so I need the frogs to be in the same color scheme as the rest of the suit.  Looking at the frogs in the picture and letting my mind ruminate on how I would go about making the frogs, I came up with an idea!!


Frogs on the original suit.  I love these!  They are really neat...except the straight pieces sticking out to the sides of them....



To start things off, I folded a piece of paper in half and copied half the design.



Flipping the paper over, I traced the half design to make a whole design.  This way, my design would be relatively equal on both sides.


I have had this piece of florists Styrofoam laying around forever, and I totally found a use for it!!!


After pinning the design to the foam, I began arranging the soutache.


After fiddling with the soutache for a while and not being happy with the outcome...it kept twisting and turning on me...I looked up on line how to work with soutache, and found this from "Threads Magazine"...


Ohmygosh!!  This technique totally made the soutache workable!!  I was so excited, and nobody was at home to share my excitement with me!

I folded the soutache in half, found the center and began working at the top of the design.



I first did one side of the design, pinning at various points as I went...




Then arranged the other side.


Now it was time to sew the frog together.  I had noticed on the back side of frogs that there is an over abundance of stitching.  All the better to hold the frog together!  Everywhere the soutache met, I whip stitched the pieces together.


After the sewing was complete, I unpinned the frog from the foam and flipped it over...WOW!!  It worked!!!


After making a loop on one side, I sewed a button on the other side!  Voila!  A custom dyed frog!  Sweet!


6 comments:

  1. Replies
    1. Hello MM! Good question. I took thread that was the same color as the soutache and tightly wound it around the ends of the soutache knotting it off when I thought it would hold. I dabbed a generous amount of Fray Check to the area of the thread all the way around the soutache and let it dry. After it had dried, I cut off the ugly end of the soutache very close to the thread being careful not to cut the thread. Then I sewed the two ends together! I hope that helps.
      Blessings!
      g

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  2. Replies
    1. Aaaawe!! You have totally made me blush! Thank you!
      Blessings!
      g

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  3. Great tutorial, but how did you make the loop with the two raw ends? I am wanting to make a similar style closure with a monkey fist button. Any tips?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Hi Alyssa!
      To close the ends I cut the ends off, used fray check to make sure the ends didn't further fray, then using the same color thread, I sewed the ends together after over lapping then together. I hope that helps!
      Blessings!
      g

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