This week’s guest blogger is one of our favorite crafty ladies, Amanda Formaro from Crafts by Amanda. She’s shared an adorable Halloween craft to do with your little ones:
“This is a fun beginner sewing project for young kids. And it’s a great way to get them started using a child-safe needle and yarn.
Parents can help with sewing the softie itself together, while kids will sew the sections and help fill him with stuffing.
Materials
- Felt – orange, white and yellow
- Yarn – white and black
- Child-safe plastic sewing needle
- 2 large sew-on googly eyes
- Cotton batting
- Pattern
- Needle and thread
- Pins
- Felt glue
- Scissors
Directions
- To begin, layer two pieces of yellow felt, two pieces of white, and two pieces of orange. Then cut out the pattern pieces and pin them to the appropriate color felt.
- Cut around the pieces, leaving a little extra above the middle and bottom pieces (as shown).
- Remove the pins and separate the pieces. Flip one set over so that when you combine the pieces, one will be for the back and one for the front.
- Using felt glue, attach the center section to the bottom, covering the yellow overlap with the orange. Repeat for the white top section.
- While a child-safe needle is easy to poke into felt, it takes a little coaxing to get the wide end of the eye through the felt. To make things easier on little ones, a grown up should create the sewing holes first. To do this, poke the child safe needle in until it stops at the eye, then gently twisting twist the needle while pulling and it will slide right through.
- Kids can sew the pieces together (using your guide holes if you created them) and the felt glue will help hold them together while they work.
- Once your child has finished sewing the sections, use the pattern as a guide to sew a black yarn smile onto one of the candy corns. Lay the pieces together back to back and sew them together with your sewing machine to close bottom corner to bottom corner, leaving the flat bottom open. Turn inside out and fill with cotton batting then sew up the bottom. For the final touch, sew on the googly eyes.
Happy Halloween!
Amanda Formaro is the crafty, entrepreneurial mother of four children. She loves to bake, cook, make kid’s crafts and create decorative items for her home. She is a crafting expert and guru in the kitchen and has appeared online and in print publications many times over the years. She is also the editor for the Home & Garden channel at Craft Gossip and owner of FunFamilyCrafts.com. You can see her crafty creations on Crafts by Amanda and her delicious recipes on Amanda’s Cookin’
