How To: Make a Mini Felt Starfish

To celebrate the launch of my new book, Super-Cute Felt Animals, I'm sharing a collection of free tutorials that you can mix and match with the projects from the book.

This week I'm sharing three mini "extras" that are designed to coordinate with the animals in the "Under the Sea" chapter: a starfish and two shells.

Today's project is the little starfish! You could enlarge the starfish templates to make a whole family of starfish in different sizes, or maybe a mama starfish and lots of little starfish babies. The mini starfish is sweet and simple, but you could decorate larger starfish with pale orange stitching or lines of seed beads sewn down each point of the star.

To make the starfish, you will need...
- the template sheet at the bottom of this post
- orange felt, approx. 2 x 4 in (5 x 10 cm)
- orange and black sewing thread
- 2 black seed beads, size 9/0
- stuffing & a pencil or other small stuffing tool
- needle, pins & embroidery scissors (great for cutting out small felt shapes!)

1. Use the templates provided to cut out two starfish shapes from orange felt.

2. Sew two small black seed beads onto one of the starfish shapes to form the eyes. Use black sewing thread and sew each bead flat like an O with three or four stitches. Then use a double thickness of black thread to backstitch the starfish’s smile.

 

3. Place the front and the back starfish pieces together. Use matching orange thread to sew around the edges with whip stitch. The starfish points can be a bit fiddly to stuff, so sew and stuff them one by one as you sew around the edge. Sew up the final gap and finish your stitching neatly at the back.

Click here to view the template sheet in another window/tab, and print it at 100%.

This tutorial is for non commercial use only: you can use it to make as many felt starfish as you want for yourself or as gifts, but please don't make any for sale. You may borrow a few photos if you want to blog about this project, but remember to credit me and link back to the original source, and do not reproduce my entire tutorial on your site. Thanks!

Super Cute-Felt Animals is published by CICO Books, RRP £12.99. It includes 35 fun felt projects, each with illustrated step-by-step instructions. It's available to buy at Amazon UK and Amazon USA and many other bookshops.

Please note: the Amazon links in this post are affiliate links.

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