(I'll put photos on this one soon.)

As one visitor to our house said "Felt practically sews itself!" It's my go-to fabric for random child requests.

In 5 minutes, you can easily make a few dog bones and a dish. (It will take longer if you do it by hand, but it's still a project measured in minutes.)

Making dog bones

  1. Fold a piece of felt in half. Cut out a small dog-bone shape. You now have two small dog bones.
  2. Put the two dog bones on a contrasting piece of shape. Cut around them, leaving a generous border.
  3. Put the big dog bone between the two little ones.
  4. Sew around the edge of the little dog bones. I used a sewing machine set to a medium zig zag, but you could hand-sew a whipstitch, too. You'd knot the thread and put the needle between the big bone and one of the little ones. Come up through the nearest little bone, down through the big bone, up through all three layers, down through just the big bone, etc.

Making a dog dish (or a teacup, or a pasta bowl...)

  1. Cut a roughly circular piece of felt. Your finished bowl will be smaller around, because the sides will curve up.
  2. Cut about 6 slits into the edge. The raised edge will be as deep as the slits, so for a dog bowl, they'll be pretty short relative to the overall size, but for a teacup, they'll go a long way. A big, shallow dog bowl might want 8 slits; a teacup might want 4 (or 5, I usually use even numbers so I can fold it up and get them roughly symmetrical, but I've cut them freehand before).
  3. Overlap the felt at the slits. You want to overlap them all in the same direction and about the same amount. If you're using a sewing machine, pin them. If you're handsewing, you can do the overlapping while you sew. If your small kid would like to sew them, consider overlapping them and punching holes.
  4. Sew around the edge. Again, on the sewing machine I used a zigzag, just below the edge. If I were handstitching myself, I'd whipstitch (just put the needle through in the same direction every time) or blanket stitch (too complex to describe in a parenthetical aside, but here are some nice instructions from someone else). For a kid, I'd set it up so there was some space between the overlapped bits, pre-punch a hole in each overlap and one between, and let them sew it together pretty much however they wanted. Running stitch would be great. An odd number of slits would let you go round twice and get a cool effect.