Felt Food (first batch)

When Fire Monkey was two, we gave him an Ikea kitchen for Christmas.  He is now 6 and still plays with it, though admittedly it has been off and on over the past 4 years.  Lately, he likes to play restaurant.  Problem is, any play food we have was part of the initial gift, and some of that has disappeared over the years. (The pineapple, I remember, was a casualty of the Ivy Dog.) I suggested that we make some felt food and the Fire Monkey agreed.

And then, like families everywhere, we were all the sudden stuck at the house All. The. Time.  So we've been sewing up some felt goodies!  Here is our first batch: breakfast!

The bacon and eggs were inspired by this tutorial at The Gunny Sack but their pieces seemed small to me, so I drew ours freehand.

And then of course we needed donuts!  Fire Monkey has had donuts as the dessert for his last two birthday parties, so these were a must-make.  I used this tutorial and pattern from Skip to My Lou, though I used a slightly different method for stuffing so I didn't have to turn anything inside out.

Shout out to Kathleen of McMusing for suggesting that I put the sewing machine pedal on the table and have Fire Monkey push it with his hands.  Brilliant!  And he loves it!  Way better than trying to sew with him on my lap.  For all of these, he pushed the pedal while I controlled the fabric.  He knows how to make a knot on my machine and he watches for when to stop.  But his favorite part?  Using the tiny brush to clean my machine under the bobbin case!!!  Seriously!  He loves it, asks to clean the machine every time!

We used overlock stitches for the exterior seams on all our food--works great and I think makes them nice and sturdy.  The sprinkles on the donuts meant I taught him a new skill--hand embroidery stitches.  He got bored with them quickly but I think they look really good.

This is project #9 in my quest to complete 52 projects in 2020.  Since the felt food feast may go on for a while, I had to define what constitutes a project.  I decided that 6 pieces of food felt (ha!) reasonable, or a similar number that reasonably goes together.  In this case, there are six pieces that could all be considered breakfast.  We've got our next "set" almost done, want to guess our next food item(s)?  I think we'll have quite a banquet soon!