Felt Christmas Decorations

Activity 3 in our five days of Christmas brings you these lovely felt Christmas Decorations. 

Christmas Pudding brooch

Brief Description: These are cute little decorations which look great as badges, keyrings, mobile phone dangles or as Christmas tree decorations. These give children the opportunity to explore their sewing skills but can be adapted for younger children using either felt or funky foam.

Keywords: Sewing, stitching, felt, brooch, Christmas, festival, winter, decoration

Materials Needed: Felt (or funky foam), needles, thread, glitter glue, scissors, badge pin/keyring/mobile phone dangle

Instructions:

• Using funky foam of felt material cut out all the different sections required for your decoration. Draw out your design on a piece of paper and carefully consider what shapes and colours you require. For younger children you can have the pieces pre cut or prepare a template ready for children to draw around.

Prepare all the pieces of felt before you start sewing together

• For the pudding, the first parts to be sewn together are the brown circles which make up the core of the image. Using a blanket stitch, stitch all around the circles. You can use any stitch you like but I think the blanket stitch leaves a nice finish.

Sew on the custard

• Next add the “custard” on this is stitched onto the pudding using the same stitch.

Make sure you use the same stitch all the way around the brooch

• Add your final decoration pieces to the pudding such as holly at the top and the black currant spots. These can be stitched on or adhered using pva or a fabric glue.

All on details such as currant and holly

• Finally glue or stitch your brooch back to the back of the pudding. If you are using a keyring fixing, stitch this on the top of the decoration or if you want to place you pudding on a tree, leave a loop of thread at the top of the pudding.

Glue or sew on a brooch back

Here are some examples of other badges, decorations ready to be made

Completed Robin brooch

Completed Penguin Brooch

Differentiation:

Key Stage 1: Key stage one children might find these a little difficult to sew, but there are options to make this more adaptable. If you have the time you can use a hole punch and make holes around the outside of the felt/funky foam and younger children can sew the pieces together with a tapestry needle and wool. Obviously this takes a lot of time in the preparation stages, so planning ahead is vital. Alternatively children can draw and cut to the best of their abilities around templates. These can be cut out with the help of an adult and then the pieces can be glued together rather than sewn.

Key Stage 2: Using patterns or pictures as guides, key stage 2 pupils should be able to use a template and cut around this to acquire all the shapes and piece for their decoration. Once again key stage 2 children can sew the main body of the piece together and glue the additional pieces to the decoration for speed. Why not have the children make a couple of decorations and sell them at the school fete?

Gifted and Talented: Gifted and Talented pupils could play around with creating their own designs and making their own templates. Encourage the children to look carefully at the theme they are going to make, i.e a robin. What are the main parts they will need? what are the shapes? how many pieces? what size is your decoration going to be? Look at the size of the wings on the robin compared with the body, the beak, the eye and so on and so forth. Think about scale, character, colour and adding your own unique finish.