Christmas trees are more than a seasonal decoration. The ornaments we choose are an expression of our personalities, interests, and hobbies. If you're contemplating a gardening theme for this year's tree, consider crafting your own felt vegetable ornaments. These adorable DIY felt vegetables are inexpensive to make and nearly impossible to break.
How to Make Felt Food Ornaments
There are several methods for making vegetables with felt, so don't worry if you're not very crafty or lack sewing skills. You can create these simple felt vegetable ornaments using either felt sheets or crafting felt wool balls. Additional supplies may include thread, embroidery floss, hot glue, cotton, polyester, or wool batting.
Making Vegetables with Felt Balls
Crafting felt wool balls are available in an array of colors and range in size from approximately 3/8 to 1½ inches (1-4 cm.). Creating DIY felt vegetables from wool balls doesn't require sewing. This technique for making vegetables with felt uses a felting needle to weld the balls together.
Round vegetables, like tomatoes, can be made from one of the larger sizes of pink or red wool balls. A green ball can be cut to form leaves and stems and welded into place with the felting needle. Oblong vegetables, like baking potatoes, are created by cutting and welding two wool balls together.
Once formed, use a sewing needle to insert a loop of string to hang these felt vegetable ornaments on the tree. Although these ornaments are non-breakable, the small wool felt balls can present a choking hazard to small children.
Easy-to-make DIY felt vegetables
Making vegetables with felt sheets is quite easy. Simply cut two matching vegetable shapes from a sheet of felt. Choose a color which best represents the desired vegetable (orange felt for carrots, purple for eggplant). Then cut leaves or stems from a sheet of green felt.
Machine sew, hand stitch, or glue the two veggie shapes together. Be sure to leave an opening at the top of the veggie so the shape can be lightly stuffed with polyester batting. Once stuffed, sew or glue the opening shut and attach a string for hanging the ornament.
Decorate the veggie with green felt leaves or stems. Use embroidery floss or permanent marker to represent details such as lines on carrots or eyes on potatoes. Don't worry if you're DIY felt vegetables are not perfect – real veggies seldom are.
If you have some sewing skills, 3D sheet felt vegetable ornaments can be crafted by sewing together a felt “ball” from four or more petal-shaped pieces. These are also stuffed with batting, sewn shut, and decorated.
Handmade Felt Vegetable Ideas
Once you've mastered how to make felt food like tomatoes and potatoes, try your hand at these additional homemade felt vegetable ideas:
- Asparagus – Make a “tube” from light green felt, then use dark green felt to create the head and scales of your asparagus.
- Cabbage – Insert a white wool ball into the center of green sheet felt “leaves” to create cabbage.
- Corn – Glue rows of braided yellow rope inside elongated green felt leaves for corn.
- Leaf lettuce – Cut slightly different leaf-lettuce shapes from green sheet felt, use a marker to add veins to each leaf.
- Peas in a pod – Insert pale green wool balls into a pod created from dark green sheet felt and you have peas in a pod.