Silk Teabag Flower

In search of metal teaballs to make a beaded Christmas decoration and having no luck, I contacted our tea manufacturers. The Rep, thinking to save me the search for something he'd not heard of, offered to send me the Silk teabag samples to use instead. I hadn't explained to him why I wanted the metal ball at that stage.
These cute bags brought out the desire to make something from them and today I made my teabag flower. I have a few more ideas for flowers and will try them out tomorrow. In the meantime here is my first effort.

Not knowing how fray-able the material was, I used fusible webbing then ironed it to the red material. I then couched gold thread around the petals and whipped this. I cut the corners from the bags and finely tacked very close to the edge over 5 petals to make into an inner circle of leaves (no fusible webbing used for these) and drew up the thread. Horrors, the entire thread and knot sailed through these petals BUT no damage was done - no fraying, so this is tough stuff.
The material left a memory of the holes so I rethreaded them and beaded the centre. I am really pleased with the finished flower.