Felt Food Friday: No Frills Orange Slice Tutorial

Yay! Its Friday!  I'm so glad I committed to making more felt food, with the holidays coming up I have way too many projects going on and this one is kind of going to the wayside.  But I still figured out how to make an orange slice and I wanted to share it with you.  There are a few very lovely fancy orange slice tutorials out there (see here and here, but when I started this project I was still hand sewing (but my machine is back now!) and I couldn't get those slices to look cute, so I thought I would just do a plain old orange.

You can make this by hand or by machine.  In addition to the needle/thread you will need:
orange felt
paper and pen
pins
something to stuff the orange with

First create your pattern.  I traced around a soup can.  You will need one circle and one pointy oval that is a bit bigger than the can.  To give some perspective, my circle was about 3" across and the oval 4 1/4", however the oval was slightly too long, which I easily remedied by trimming the end during the pinning process.

Cut out your shapes.  Leave about a quarter inch for seam allowance.

Find the middle of each piece and pin them together.

Continue to pin around the orange and sew. I would show this completely pinned but apparently not being able to use your sewing machine for a year causes you to lose all your supplies... all I could find were four pins. I stopped sewing before I got to the 2nd pointy end so I could make sure my fabric was lined up right.

I began at the middle and ended about 1 1/2" from my starting point. 

Turn the slice right-side out and stuff.  I used the batting of an old couch pillow, you can use pretty much anything.  Close it off with a blind stitch.  I am not showing a picture of this because I am bad at it.

Optional:  I prefer a crisper look to my orange so I pinched the sides of the top together and stitched across it.

And you are done!

Also, when I handstitched my orange, I kept my stitches on the outside because I thought it helped make the orange more orange shaped:

If you have any felt food projects please share them with me!

Quick Toddler Slipper Tutorial

My husband has been complaining that Owen doesn't have any slippers to wear around the house.  This past weekend I came up with an easy idea to make slippers that I thought I would share with you.  Owen had a pair of fleece footie pajamas that the zipper had broken on.  So I turned them into slippers.  My sewing machine is in the repair shop so I used the glue gun, but it would be much better to sew them, and I plan on doing so once I get my machine back.

Before:

First cut the feet off of a pair of pajamas.  Leave several inches at the top, so it looks like a boot.

Second, cut strips of the fleece (or use another fabric) long enough to wrap around the ankles of your child.  I didn't measure, and I should have, mine were too short at first.  I also found that my fleece had less stretch when I cut vertical strips (but they didn't look as cute with the pattern...)

Sew (or glue) velcro to the strips.  Make sure that you are attaching the velcro to opposite sides of the fabric.  Put the loop velcro on the front of your strip and the hook velcro on the back of your fabric.

If one of the legs of your slipper has a zipper in it, stitch it closed.

Attach the strip to the back of the slipper.

And thats it!  Wrap the strip around your child's ankle and secure the slipper in place.  Fold the top over and you are all done.  My son, who takes his socks off constantly has not removed these once.  Although maybe your child is more of a genius than mine...

Also--now that you have your materials out, you should get out your child's mittens and make strips for those too!  I did, and it would have been awesome, but 1) they were too long and 2) the glue did not hold because of all the stretching.  But once my sewing machine is back in business I will definitely make some ;)

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