Felt Food Extreme

Hello! Lots of new stuff going on around here since I've been gone. I am just about done with my nanny job and taking an online class so that maybe, just maybe I can get a teaching job in the near future. We have not one, but two cats in the house, both rescued from the cruel world which abandons even 6 week-old babies (that would be the newest one, currently crying from her quarantine room. Only 4 more days of this!) And of course, new crafts and ideas sprouting everyday. Like for instance the Christmas present idea I had for my husband! Have to work on that when he's on night shift, and since I won't be able to complete it in front of him, will have to send it off for completion, so that's why I'm 6 months ahead.

But today I thought I'd try to complete an update to the felt food gifts I was making for my friend's 3 year old (well, she's 3 now). I took her the last box a few months ago and she had the biggest kick out of checking them all out. Then she showed me her new play kitchen set complete with all the great food. I can tell the food pieces will never be lonely, at least not for a long while.

Again, one super stuffed, medium sized "if it fits, it ships" boxes from the post office.

Breakfast: eggs in the carton, sunny-side up eggs (oh no! Her link isn't working! Hopefully I can get this remedied...these were SO not something I could have come up with on my own!), and bacon.

Halved lemons, oranges, and kiwi. What you can't see is that they have velcro centers so they can be cut apart! Oh, and the orange sort-of unbalanced the pic, so they are not shown.

"Tot-tarts", AKA toaster pastries.

Chocolate glazed doughnuts from Krispy Kreme. Because if you're going to splurge on a doughnut, it's got to be only the best!

This box also had a few extras from sets I hadn't finished with the previous set.

Um...oops. I made a LOT of food!! Didn't quite realize how much until I saw it all together.

She's quite the Southern cook! Who knows, maybe a Paula Deen in the making!



Some of these I made from others tutorials, and if so, you can find them by clicking on the link. If no link, I created my own patterns by seeing what others had done and visualizing it myself. I would like to swear that I will eventually get tutorials up on those, but lets be realistic for a while, ok? Anyway, I'll be making more soon for another friend whose daughter will be 2 this year, so that can be a goal. I will TRY to make tutorials. Just can't swear to it right now!

Felt Food Mania

Okay. So I promised to do more updating and here I am. It occurred to me that I posted a while back that I had finished my first box load of felt food and mailed it off, or at least I mentioned it in the Finished column.  Yet I never posted any pictures or links to the inspiration and patterns that helped me create them.  (Many of them you will see were found at Helping Little Hands' Felt Food Cook-Along) Prepare for a bunch of links!

This box is the size of one of those medium Priority Mail boxes. And just look at what all fit into it!!

 Felt cookies from this website. No patterns were used, it's really simple. Just two cream colored felt pieces layered together with a fun frosting, sprinkled. The chocolate chip cookies were inspired by these blueberry muffins.  I loved her idea that the blueberries are not always on top, and since chocolate chips usually look the same in the cookies, I duplicated it.  After sewing the random curly-q's to the wrong sides, I sewed the right sides together, leaving a space to flip them through.  Now, I also think that they look better a bit thicker, so I used scrap batting from quilting projects to stuff them before hand sewing the cookies closed.  K says her little girl is in love with the cookies right now. 

I love these tomatoes.  I'll show you the website and pattern I found them on, but when you see it, you'll kick yourself for not seeing how simple they are! It's nothing more than a large circle gathered and stuffed.  Cut out a leafy top, sew it on and you're done! And the tomato slices were just as easy, you'll see!

I have been wracking my brain and wearing out my search engine, but I cannot for the life of me think of where I saw an idea for the hamburger and buns.  At the bare minimum, I probably saw one in a Flickr pool of felt food and was inspired to create my own pattern based out of the creation of other foods, like the sliced bread (below).  The only thing that makes the burgers cuter than a bug to me is the grill marks: black embroidery thread stitched in straight lines. I don't know about you, but my hubby never manages to get the perfect cross-hatch on a burger.

These are some of my favorite pieces, and until K's little girl got the cookies, she too was in love with the first slice of bread I made for her.  Rather than create 3 different links, I'm just going to make one, back to the Felt Food Cook-Along, because that's where all but the lunch meat came from.  The lunch meat is little more than a piece of pink felt (or 2 if you want more thickness or stability), cut with pinking shears and machine stitched around the edge for a bit of detail.  The rest of the food in the picture is the Sliced Bread, the Chicken Pieces/Chicken Nuggets in the Felt Fajitas, and The Amazing Changing Felt Pizza Crust/Tortilla. 

These bananas and corn-cobs were super fun to create! I think I need a set just to keep here at the house for me to play with!  When I make them again, I want to find a way to put magnets inside the individual pieces. When K's daughter played with them, she had difficulty getting the pieces back together.  Securing the magnets so that they won't be a swallowing/choking hazard isn't actually the issue, I have that figured out.  It's finding cheap magnets that aren't cost-prohibitive!

The carrots were super cute when finished, and I kinda went overboard cutting out orange felt, and I think I made 20-ish carrots!  The strawberries, while cute, aggravated me.  I made most of them too small, which makes them choking hazards, so I had to send her only a few, with the promise to make more, larger ones, soon.  And these oranges....I'm in love. (Here's the link for the peel)  They were actually the first food pieces I made, and they clinched it....I am a FELT FOOD MANIAC!!

Felt Food

I have been having so much fun this week! I am making a pantry full of felt food!  That's the gift i'm giving my friend's daughter for her birthday. I know, I said I wouldn't write about it to keep the surprise, but I needed to know some of K's favorite foods.  And I figured, if she doesn't see what's being made, it's not such a big loss of surprise, is it?  So, no pictures to post, no details to write about, just the knowledge that I am enjoying my food without having to see it end up on my hips!

P.S. When making felt food, it is ALWAYS easier to use the tutorials and printable patterns that are out there, rather than try to wing it on your own!  I started with doughnuts, thought I knew what I was doing, and it took me three hours to complete 1 doughnut! Without icing!! Now, I've seen the pattern and tutorial and feel like smacking myself on the forehead! Such a dingbat!

Moving Update

Only 3 more days til I drive up to the U-Haul to pick up the truck (apparently the only way I get to drive the truck, which I actually like doing, is to pick up the truck. Which, considering I'm the one who thought to reserve the truck, makes sense...) I have now made 7 trips with full car loads (2 on Saturday, and 2 cars one trip yesterday) to the house. Very little actually remains in my house except for the furniture, appliances, and my clothes. Yes, J was really good and packed all his clothes. I, on the other hand, packed my shoes (3 boxes!) and nearly had a cow. I'm scared to pack the clothes and see just how much I have. I may actually have a heart-attack!

Mom came up this week to celebrate our birthdays (4/23 and 5/9), so basically i put her to work! She was more than happy to help though, referencing her own parents assistance when she moved back in the ice age (j/k mom! ;) And why do I love my mommy? Because I knew she would be perfectly suited for a job, and she Loved working on it. --Changing out the shelf liners. The liners on the shelves and drawers WAS an old 70-80s style apple kitschy plaid-like pattern. Green, and dirty. The pantry shelves were BadLy sponge-painted (I will have to post a pic, it's that bad), and they NEED to be replaced. We didn't get the liners complete, and I may end up having to buy another roll of Contact paper, but the finished look is SOOOO much better.

What else have I been doing, you ask? Well, aside from stuffing and taping boxes to load and unload in the car, not to mention the unpacking of said boxes at the new house in an effort to stay as much ahead of the task as possible...very little. I have begun work on the Funky House blocks to swap, and I have already been planning how to put the final quilt together once I receive said blocks. I think I want to make a town, you know, with a Wal-Mart, a church, the school, J's plant, etc. Fuzzy black dog playing in the front yard, trees, street lamps/lights, maybe a car or two...ambitious, I know. Maybe make the sashing be a dark gray for asphalt streets....

I did spray paint the cool baker's rack I picked up at a flea market for $20. It was dirty and rusty, and boring with it's cream paint. I picked up the Hammered finish Rust-Oleum, and it's gorgeous now. No way you would think it came from a flea market. Note to others: spray painting on a windy day= BAD IDEA!! My feet are still slightly bronze. And the porch is too. (oops)

And I have come up with a plan for a boring wall in the kitchen (I mentioned this the other day). It's only about 7 feet long, and is between the dining room entry, and the garage stairs door, so there is not enough room to place any furniture. So what to do with boring, white wall.......This I considered while giving Tigger a bottle last week. It came to me...chalkboard paint. No, don't ask me where the thought came from. No idea. I can't remember the process that got me from his bottle to the paint. But I picked up a quart of the stuff, and will be painting the top half of the wall tomorrow. Once the paint is dry, my acrylics come out, and I am going to turn that board into a Menu and Schedule board. It will be Bee-u-tiful. I think.

Proving my point that a crafter's work is never done, I have a project planned for a vaca in June - felt food. I've been saving empty food boxes to stuff and tape to use in the "kitchen area" at the babies' house. Then I found tutorials on making play food. Which I can't find at yard sales, and I'm not allowed to buy new stuff for children I haven't given birth to. Since I have felt left over from making felt board stories, this will use the rest of that felt, and be a great project to work on for the 6 hour drive both ways. It will fit in a small bag, and since it is hand-work, easy to do in the car! I will also probably make some as a Christmas gift for a special someone, but telling who might ruin the surprise.

Now, you may be wondering, where are the pics of what I have worked on this week. Um.. they are on the camera, which is at the babies' house, because I had two 9 month-olds today, and they were adorable playing together, so I got the camera out, took some great pics...and left the camera on the couch, where I placed it out of the reach of grubby fingers that could have pulled it to the floor to suffer an ignoble death. So I will rescue the camera and load pics tomorrow.

Now, as I am both physically and mentally tired from all the work this week, I am going to go take my shower, and go to bed early. Pepe thinks this is a great idea, and has thought so for the last 3 hours, since he's been stretched out across the couch that long. I am sitting on just enough cushion to hold me, as he thinks nose to tail-tip is how much he requires! Smart-aleck.