Frugal Babe

Christmas is almost here, and I think I’m finally finished making felt food.   Here is the current food collection:

I’ve already posted pictures and details about some of this stuff, but I’ve made quite a bit more since the last time I posted.

We now have a pizza that comes apart for lots of pizza-making fun.  The crust has a piece of cardboard sewn into it to make it rigid, and then the sauce, cheese, and toppings are all separate pieces so they can be taken apart and put back together any way he likes.  The pizza pan came from Goodwill.

There’s also a banana that comes out of its peel.  I love this!

For my first attempt at the banana, I used four elongated ovals, but it ended up looking more like a football than a banana (so I stitched some laces onto it and gave it to my boys).  For my second attempt (pictured – I’m very happy with how it turned out), I used just three pieces of white felt, and made them much longer and thinner than my original try.  It worked much better.  The peel is three pieces of yellow felt and three pieces of white felt (all the same size as the three pieces of white felt that make up the banana).  This probably took nearly two hours to make, including both attempts.  It’s one of the more complicated pieces I’ve made, but it turned out very cute.

In addition to the banana and the strawberries that I posted a while ago, I’ve made an assortment of other fruits and veggies.  A watermelon slice, celery sticks (two of them are stuffed with peanut butter), a cucumber slice, carrots and carrot slices, banana slices, several varieties of berries, spinach leaves, tomato slices, apple slices, a lemon slice, a broccoli floret, and some asparagus.  Some of these I came up with on my own, and a couple were inspired by other sites.  (asparagus, carrots).  I just found a tutorial for a broccoli floret that looks much easier than what I did, so I think I might have to add a few of those…

I was browsing around on etsy looking for inspiration, and I found these adorable ice cream cones with removable ice cream and multiple flavors.  I had to make some.  So now we have an ice cream cone with four flavors of ice cream:  blueberry, spinach-mint (try it – it’s yummy!), vanilla, and raspberry. 

I’ve made three eggs.  There are still a lot of spaces in that egg carton, but not a lot of days before Christmas.  So he’s probably going to get an egg carton with lots of empty spaces and three eggs in it.

I found this adorable little Melissa & Doug muffin pan and oven mitt at Goodwill last week ($1.49 for the set) and couldn’t resist.  I made a banana muffin and a blueberry muffin to go with the cupcake that I made a while ago.  I may or may not get another muffin made to go in the fourth hole.  Our son has been using my muffin pans and filling the holes with blocks for about the last year (and then he sticks them in his “oven” which is the space under the coffee table).  So I’m thinking he’ll figure something out for that fourth hole if I don’t get another muffin made.

A slice of bread and Swiss cheese were among the first things I made, but I’ve now finished the sandwich – it has a leaf (lettuce?  Too dark?  Let’s say it’s kale.  That would be perfectly normal in our house), a tomato slice, and cheese.

And to round everything out, we have more felt dessert than we’d have in a whole year if it were real.  But it’s felt, so we can have as much as we want In addition to the slices of pie I made when I first started this project, I’ve also made lots of cookies, a brownie, and a slice of mint chocolate cake.

Cookies are easy and fun to make, so I made a bunch of them as Christmas tree ornaments for our nieces and several of my friends’ kids.

I’m pretty excited for our son to see all of this on Sunday morning.  And I’m proud of the fact that everything we’re giving him is secondhand or homemade.  The kitchen was a Craigslist find, and all of the pots, pans, dishes and utensils came from thrift stores.  And of course, I’ve made all of the food (and rescued some food containers from the recycle bin, like my husband’s half-n-half carton). 

In addition to the kitchen, we’ve got two other presents for our son, both from Goodwill.  I scored a large box of Lincoln Logs a few weeks ago, for three bucks.  They were in a generic brown cardboard box, but I happened to look inside and was thrilled to find them.  I had hours of fun playing with Lincoln Logs with my brother, and I think they’ll be perfect for our boys.  I also found a large box of Flexiwheels building blocks for $2.50.  They’re like Lego, but they can hook together lengthwise on hinges or be clicked together like Lego.    

This is the first Christmas that we’ve given our son presents, as it’s the first year that he’s really old enough to understand what’s going on.  We’re not giving our 8 month-old anything, although there are presents for him from Grandma and Grandpa.  He will be more than thrilled with the boxes and wrapping paper from his brother’s presents, and will likely spend Christmas morning snuggled up with us, clapping his hands and watching his brother.

I hope you all have a wonderful holiday weekend.  Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah, Happy Solstice!  Remember to enjoy the simple things.

For the past few weeks, I’ve been tinkering with felt food for at least a few minutes every day.  I’ve had a few projects (like a banana with a removable peel – picture coming soon) that took over an hour to make, but most of the items have come together much faster than that.  Our son’s play kitchen is going to be fully stocked by Christmas morning, and I’m having so much fun making the food for him.  I even made a felt pizza for one of his friends, and a bunch of felt cookie tree ornaments for friends and family.  My felt pizza inspiration came from this site, although I made all of the toppings double layer to make them a bit more durable and easier to handle.  For green pepper rings, I tried several methods and ended up liking this one the best.  They come together in about five minutes and look really cute.  Our son was watching me make the pizza for his friend (he has no idea that I’m making another one for him) and he liked to line up the pepper rings as if they’re a pepper and then “slice” them apart using a butter knife.  The 3-D structure of this pepper ring style makes it more realistic for that sort of play.

So now for some pictures of what I’ve been up to. 

An ice cream cone, inspired by this site:

A plate of pancakes that I thought of after finding a huge chunk of tan felt at a thrift store for a dollar.  I only had a few minutes to sew that day, and wanted something that would come together fast.  I stuffed them with some leftover felt scraps to give them a bit of dimension, although I’ve found that understuffing is much better than overstuffing with felt food.

The plate was 50 cents at a thrift store.  The strawberries were inspired by this tutorial and are actually pretty quick and easy to make.  They’re just a half circle of red felt sewn into a cone shape, stuffed, and gathered at the top using a running stitch.  Then you add little yellow stitches for seeds and sew a leaf-shaped piece of green felt on top. 

A few days ago I found this site and loved all the pictures of food she’s made.  The tea bags were so cute I had to whip some up – they literally take about three minutes, although I spent about another three minutes embroidering the word “Tea” on the first one I made:

I also really liked her “infinity bread.”  I had been thinking of making tortillas, but I loved the idea of wraps that would hold their shape when you roll or fold them.  She said she was keeping her trick a secret, but just seeing the finished product got me thinking about how I could make a tortilla that would hold it’s shape when you bend it.  I looked in my craft supplies and found a wad of craft wire that had come in a box of thrift store embroidery floss.  It was pretty thin, so I twisted two lengths of it together to make a thicker strand.  I cut two circles out of felt using a medium size plate as a template.  Then I sewed them together with a seam that was about an inch in from the edge.  Next, I bent the ends of the craft wire (don’t want it poking through the fabric) and then tucked it in next to the seam I had made, so that it was hidden inside the one-inch flap at the edge of the tortilla.  Then, holding the craft wire in place as I sewed, I made another seam around the edge of the tortilla, just on the outside of the craft wire.  When I was finished, the craft wire was encased in the felt, with a seam on each side.  All that was left to do was trim off the excess felt to even up the edges, and viola!  A tortilla that holds its shape!

You can roll it up with a bunch of veggies inside (still have to make those…) and it will stay rolled.  Very cool.

I think the picture makes it pretty easy to understand how I did it.  You can see the two seams – the craft wire is in between them.  This project took about 15 minutes.  You probably have some flexible wire lying around somewhere (that junk bucket in the garage, maybe?).  You want it to be pretty flexible – I think a coat hanger would be too stiff, for example – so that little hands can bend and roll it. 

I have lots more food and ideas that I’ll share with you over the next few days.  And as always, I’d love to hear about your creative Christmas gift ideas – things you’re making or doing or re-purposing for other people, instead of wading through crowds at the mall. 

I think I might be on my way to needing a 12 step program for felt food addiction.  I can’t stop making food!  It’s so much fun, and the internet is overflowing with awesome ideas.  Here’s the stuff I’ve made over the last few days.

Bread.

With a piece of Swiss cheese.

Apple pie (inspired by this post but made without a pattern)

Cherry cheesecake.

Cherry pie (my favorite!)

Mushrooms (more veggies coming soon for a salad bowl… I didn’t have any veggie-colored felt until today).  My mushroom inspiration came from here.

And a cupcake.

I picked up a bunch of felt this evening so I have lots of color options now.  If you look at the stuff I’ve made so far, it’s mostly pink, brown, tan, and white.  That’s pretty much what I had in my felt stash.  But now I have lots of greens, reds, oranges and plenty of other shades for whatever foods come to mind. 

Hope you’ve all had a great weekend.  We avoided the shopping shenanigans that goes on after Thanksgiving and spent the weekend hanging out with family, working on our basement, and – of course! – making felt food.  I haven’t been very crafty for the past few years, so I think I’m making up for lost time.  But I promise to write about something other than felt food soon!