Today, we have a very special guest on the May Arts Ribbon Blog!  Please help us welcome Michele Kosciolek!  It was so much fun working with this talented lady and hope you enjoy her stunning project as much as I did.  Don’t forget to to show some love and post your comments at the end!

Hi everyone! I’m Michele and I am SO excited to be sharing with you today as a guest designer for May Arts. I am from Michigan and live there now, I am an aunt to 2 beautiful nieces and a HUGE May Arts Ribbon lover.

Today, I am sharing a decorative pillow I made embellished with a chrysanthemum embroidered using the ¼ silk ribbon.

You will need an embroidery hoop, pillow form, fabric, a needle and over course the gorgeous silk ribbon (white SK01, ivory SK09 and antique gold SK-33).

The set up for this project is pretty easy; cut your fabric into 2 pieces about a ½ inch larger that you form, put one piece in your hoop so it is fairly tight and I marked a small circle in the middle with chalk as a guide to get me started.

I started with the white silk embroidering random lengths, some knotted at the end and some not, for the petals. After I had a full flower with white I added some ivory, to create texture.

I created the flower center by knotting the antique gold. I used my sewing machine to sew the 2 pieces of fabric together leaving a hole to insert the pillow form; once the form is in I sewed the hole closed by hand.

Here is the finished pillow.

And here is a close up of the flower.

Thanks so much for stopping by and thank you Ribbon Lady for inviting me to be a guest!! I had so much fun working on this project!!