How to make your own fiddlehead fern boutonnieres from sculpy clay

So the time has come to tackle the boutineer's — err Boots'nEars? Umm no, no Butineers? Spell check wants me to type “Mutineers” but I know that's not right. Although I would make some mutineers if I could. Oh screw it… lapel pins aka boutonnieres!

The idea is to use sculpy clay to create fiddlehead ferns. These ferns are mad $$ in real life for the real flower, but they came out awesome in sculpy clay.

So I got purple, black, and brown sculpy clay and started rolling! Here's how I made fifteen unique fiddlehead fern boutonnieres on the cheap and easy…

Each clay has four strips per package and I used one piece of each color to knead together the correct eggplant tone. Made a few little 2-3 inch “snakes” (which is about my sculpting extreme for talent) and rolled them up, baked em' in the oven and voila — better than ever fiddlehead ferns for my craft. I also got some light moss green felt, thread, thin wire, crimp beads, ribbon, purple and pearl beads, green flower tape and the obligatory “small bag of gears” from Ebay. I wanted to add a little steampunk onto my pins. And out came the must have go-to-it glue gun!

I cut the felt into small leaf shapes with little slit holes in the bases. Then I wired up my gears and beads on thin wire cut about 6″ long. I folded the wire through the hole and basic stitched the pieces together so my leaf had some backbone. I started at the bottom and stitched up, keeping the wire in place between each stitch and working the thread between the beads.

So that when I got to the top I could easily slip in the baked sculpy clay fern head.

And then stitch that down to the leaf too.

They were easy to assemble at this point. I cut flower tape and also a short piece of ribbon.

Wrapped the flower tape on first and glue gunned the purple ribbon into place next.

You can see I also added little jag cuts to the edges of the felt to get a more ‘leaf' like presentation once the pieces where stitched down and secured.

And because I have a HUGE amount of these to make I made a little assembly line of them and went to town, making 15 in all. One for the groom, five groomsmen, four dads, four moms, and the Officiant. All together they made a passel of pins, each one a little unique!