Felt Flower Corsage

I bought a new coat last week. In fact, my friend and I bought exactly the same coat, in different colours. Anyway, I wanted to try and make a flower corsage to go with it, I'd seen lots, all different styles. I was aiming for something quite large and floppy, with some stamens in the middle. I'd previously tried to make felt flowers by wrapping the pre-formed stamens round a pebble, then covering the whole pebble with layers of fibres, felting, then cutting to form the petals and get the pebble out, I found all this quite complicated. So an experiment followed.
I first pre-felted two pieces of flat felt, then cut out large daisy shapes, and put one ontop of the other.
I also made some stamens by rolling very fine pieces in the middle until felted, while leaving the ends un-felted. What I hoped to do was to fold them in half and place the un-felted ends in the centre of the flower, then fold all the petals together around them, so that it looked like a bud, all closed up. Then I used some hot water on just the end which was the centre of the flower, wrapped it up in net and rolled the flower sideways in a blind.
The theory was ok, but in practice I found my petals had felted together a bit too much and I had to tease them apart. At this point I thought that trying to felt a two-layer flower with stamens all together was perhaps a bit too ambitious.
I persevered (it's important to not give up even when things don't quite work as you expect) carefully rolling first with the flower sideways, then with it folded in half flat with the petals at the top, finishing off shaping by hand.

The stamens have just about attached, and I've shaped each petal by folding it in half lengthways as it dried which gives the flower a lot more structure. I've over-estimated the shrinkage, so it's pretty big, but the colours have come out really well, and if you're going to wear a felt flower it might as well make a statement. And it did make me want to try more flowers with different colours.