Felt Food Class!

This past weekend my good friend Stephanie and I taught our first craft class together.  We're doing a "Homemade Holiday Craft Series" at our local art gallery.  The idea is for moms to get together to make beautiful things for their children for Christmas.  Our first session was a felt fruit and veggie basket.  We had 9 beautiful mamas show up and it was a fabulously productive afternoon of sewing and coming together in a spirit of creativity and craftiness!

Here are some of the mamas busy at work!

Here's some individual pictures of what we made, and some links to help get you started! 

Firstly mamas, I urge you to get 100% wool felt to do these crafts...if you've never had the JOY of working with Wool felt I'll tell you...once you start, you'll never go back to cheapy acrylic again.  The other thing is that the only thing in our baskets that was machine stitched is the banana.  Everything else was lovingly stitched by hand.  I think there is something just so beautiful about hand stitching.

For the pears I printed off the template from UK lass in US.  For our pears I had some lovely leather stems that we used at the top from Stockade.   To sew all of our fruit and veggies we use the blanket stitch.  It's an essential stitch to learn, and really does finish off your fruit and veggies nicely!

This same gal has an  apple on her site.  I did two things with this template...when used at regular size it makes a great apple, but when made smaller, the wedges make a fantastic little tomato.  It takes 4 large wedges to do an apple and 6 smaller ones to do a tomato. 

I found this super cool pattern for a banana in a peel from here.  My only word of advice with the pattern is that when I was cutting out the parts for the inner banana I made the template a bit smaller.  Isn't it just awesome though!

Strawberries!  This is a wonderful strawberry pattern...they're so darn sweet.

Orange section...I do mine a bit different, (go up to see the picture)...cutting out a piece of yellow felt for the circle and smaller wedge shapes. 

Here's a tutorial for some carrots.  The ones we made are similar, but I made longer tops for ours.  To sew the tops on first I use a gathering stitch to gather up the top of the carrot, then roll up the "leaves" and blanket stitch them on!

The mushrooms are tweaked from our toadstool tutorial...brought down in size and only stuffed with stuffing.  If you want to get fancy, you can do some lovely embroidery on the underside, to make it look mushroomy!

And finally some sweet little felt peas.  When I saw them I just knew we'd HAVE to have some in our baskets!

I smile when I think of all of the lucky kids in our area who will be receiving such wonderful gifts crafted with LOVE!

If you're in our area and are interested in attending on of our classes you can check them out HERE.  We only have a few spaces left per class, so sign up soon!

Sewing sweet felt food is highly addictive...once you start, it's so hard to stop!  Do a google search for "felt food tutorials", and you'll see that there are all sorts of possibilities beyond the fruit and veggie basket!

Happy holiday creating!

xo maureen