Felt food has been all the rage on many crafting sites for the last few years. From simple cookies to elaborate sushi sets, you can find seemingly any food imaginable in felt. These handmade goodies spark not only a child’s imagination, but also seem to speak to a desire that many parents have to provide their children with open-ended play things.
The good news is that it is extremely easy to create easier felt foods at home for very little money spent. (This fact makes these felt cookies an excellent, inexpensive handmade Christmas gift.) Even if you are sewing challenged (like myself), you can likely work your way through a felt cookie project. If you are more experienced, you can work on more elaborate foods or use a simple project, like this one, to help children learn to hand sew.
While they are many ways to make felt cookies, I’ll walk you through a simple cookie like the ones shown above.
Materials Needed:
– Scissors
– Sewing Needle
– Something to Mark Pattern (I use a Sharpie, because I just like Sharpies)
– Round Pattern for Cookie (I traced around a drinking glass onto some thick cardstock. You can also make other shapes. My daughter is a big fan of the heart shaped cookies I’ve made for her.)
– Two pieces of felt (One color for the cookie and one color for the frosting)
– Embroidery Floss
Step One
Trace your pattern onto the felt you are using for your cookie, and cut them out.
I like to use a tan colored felt for this, but you can use any color you want. Try to fit as many cookies onto one piece of felt, keeping in mind that you will need two circles for each cookie.
I like to cut out all of the circles (from a whole piece of felt) at once in order to speed up mass cookie production.
Step Two
Cut out your icing out of the other color felt that you’ve picked out. If you like things to be very uniform, you can make a pattern for the frosting. I really enjoy all of the frosting pieces being free form, so I just randomly cut.
Step Three
Attach the frosting piece to one of the cookie pieces. I do this by randomly making “sprinkles” of varying sizes on the whole frosting part.
For increased decoration, you can do something like make an “X” instead of just a single line for the sprinkle. While that doesn’t seem like any normal sprinkle, it is actually a nice look. Another option would be to add small beads while making each sprinkle. (Cookies with beads on them shouldn’t be given to small children, however, as they could come off and become a choking hazard.)
Step Four
After your sprinkles are all in place, you’ll want to stitch together the two halves of your cookie.
If you have a sewing machine, you can quickly move through this by using your machine. I, however, always hand stitch each part of these. (I like that this is a very portable craft, and I can work on these almost anywhere.) I use a blanket stitch to attach the two halves. (Here is a fabulous, and easy to understand, picture tutorial on how to do a blanket stitch to put two pieces of felt together.)
Make sure to stop sewing when you have just a little bit of opening left, and put in a little bit of stuffing, unless you want a very flat cookie. After you’ve added the stuffing, you can finish sewing the rest of the way around the cookie.
Step Five
Admire your cute felt cookie. Consider making a whole set of them in different colors as an inexpensive gift for birthdays or Christmas. They can be packaged in a small bakery box or maybe even accompanied by a small cookie sheet, plastic spatula, and apron.
What are some of your favorite simple handmade gifts to give? Do you have handmade plans for the holidays this year?
Angie, a contributing writer at The Happy Housewife, is a homeschooling mom to three children and writes about faith, family, and household management at Many Little Blessings. She is probably more likely to be found with a paint brush than with a sewing machine.
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