I decided to make my first kanzashi as gifts for the holiday season to motivate me to practice and do a lot. Because starting out doing all the little things you need to do beforehand kind of kills the creative instinct for me.  So I made theeeese! I honestly don't think a lot of the people I gave them to liked them that much(except for my roommate, who took the picture for me and is awesome), but it was hard to shop for a lot of those girls anyway. I'm still having some trouble with petal-shaping being as precise as I want it(everything wants to turn into a leaf-shape), and I can't entirely understand the instructions I've seen for the various shapes.  And I'm getting better at not coloring so much of the center so it looks uneven like that. Urrrgh, all I can see is flaws.

Pleeeeease forgive the copious dog hair in the picture. I have to work on the floor for space reasons, and one of my roommate's has a shedding dog the size of a small pony. I couldn't find my camera at the time and I just gave the purple one to my roommate, so this was my last chance to get a shot of them all together. The yellow one was later moved to a clip like the rest because you had to push down directly onto the flower to open and close and it fell off. I put it on the snap because it was for someone with shorter hair, but a clip is still doable.

My family is made up of a bunch of foodies. So much so that this exchange happened with my five-year old cousin:

Me: Trip, what's your favorite animal?
Trip: PIG!
Me: Hmm, that's an unusual one. What's your second favorite?
Trip: CHICKEN!
Me: Are you sure it's not a cat, like the one you have at home? That has to be at least your third favorite...
Trip: NO, COW!
Me: I think you misunderstood the question...

I asked him this because one time I sewed a hole in his stuffed frog Ribbit and he was ridiculously happy about it, so I wanted to make him something. But if he likes pigs, so be it. I thought I'd portray his food-loving in the final product by drawing with a fabric marker the meat diagram on the pig. I came up with this idea later, otherwise I wouldn't have used fleece since this made the writing more difficult.
It was an even bigger hit with his parents, who thought it was pretty funny. Trip has since named him Butter.