Felt tea bags, pancakes, and toaster pastries

 
Sounds like a sort of unbalanced meal, doesn't it?  I'm trying to keep up with my promise to share links to instructions, tutorials, and so on for some of my recent crafting.  So here goes.

For the tea bags, I just cut small squares of white felt (mine were about 1-3/8" x 1-5/8"-- so, not exactly square).  You cut 2 of these for each tea bag, and then a smaller dark brown square (mine were about 7/8" x 1-1/4") for the "tea" inside.  The first time I made these I cut the white squares with pinking shears, which was cute, but I honestly thought they were just as cute without.  So you sandwich the brown square in between the 2 white ones, tucking a length of cord (I used yellow and white bakers twine) into the top, and you machine sew all around the edges.  Then you take 2 small felt shapes (I used hearts of different colors) and sew them together by hand, slipping the other end of the cord or twine between them.  It almost takes longer to write this out than it did to sew them!  Cutting out the small pieces does take a bit of time.

I made a dozen tea bags for each girl and packaged them just in simple plastic food storage containers from Walmart.

I made a label for each using cute printables from The Cottage Market.  An easy way to access just what you want from this site is to go to their Pinterest boards and find the one labeled Cottage Market Freebies (or a similar name -- I can't remember just what it's called -- may be Cottage Market Free Printables).  From there you can easily find the link to the printable you'd like.  Or you could design your own label as I've done for some of the other foods.

For the felt pancakes, I used this tutorial: :Felt Pancakes from Turkey Feathers.

These are easy, easy, easy!  All done by machine except for the butter pat.

And for the toaster pastries, which I failed to take pictures of, I used this tutorial: Felt Toaster Pastries from Treasures for Tots.  I'm sure these could be done by machine too, but I think the blanket stitching around the edge makes them look more real.  The ones I made for the girls were intended to be strawberry flavored.  I used pink felt for frosting and a variety of pink beads for sprinkles.  This picture is of some I had previously made with white frosting and multicolored sprinkles.

I should add (this is probably a no-brainer, but I'll add it anyway) that when I make any felt food involving a simple, generic shape like a rectangle or circle, like these, I'll make a pattern out of newspaper or tracing paper and label it (like "felt pancakes, small circle, cut 2 tan") and so on.  That way, when I want to make that particular food again, I am all ready.  I keep all of my felt food patterns together in a zip-top quart size bag within a folder of the various felt food instructions.

I also like to package my felt foods in plastic zip-top bags with a label.  I like to think this helps to keep it corraled when the kids aren't playing with it, but that may just be wishful thinking.

Trying to hunt up all of the links for these felt foods made me remember something I've been wanting to do for ages: do an entire post with links for ALL of the felt food I've made over the past 5 years or so.  People often ask for specific instructions/patterns but I have never taken the time to get all of the links in one place.  It's going to take awhile, but hopefully I can put a post like that on my Christmas blog in the next week or two.  Stay tuned!