How To Cut out Small Felt Shapes

One of the questions I get asked most often is "do you have any tips for cutting out small and fiddly felt shapes?"... I've written about it before in my guide to designing and making your own felt brooches, but I thought it would be helpful to have a separate post about it.

I always recommend buying a pair of embroidery scissors for felt crafting. The small, sharp blades make it much easier to cut out small or intricate shapes.

These are the scissors I use in my work - you can see how much smaller the blades are on the two pairs of embroidery scissors compared to the standard sewing scissors.

I sell a smaller pair of stork embroidery scissors in my shop. If you're going to be doing a large amount of cutting, you might want to invest in a pair with comfy handles (I bought mine from John Lewis).

I always roughly trim any excess felt around the paper pattern piece before I start cutting the shape - I find a small piece of felt is much easier to manoeuvre.

Hold the pattern piece in place against the felt between your thumb and fingers while you cut around the pattern.

Cutting out small or fiddly shapes can be tricky, so go slowly, turning the felt & pattern piece in your hand as you cut.

If the shape is really fiddly and/or if you're using a nice colour or some lovely felt you don't want to waste, you might want to practice on some unwanted scraps to get the hang of it before you cut out the shape for real.

Please do share any of your own tips in the comments :)

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Big Rainbows and Small Birds

The weather may be gloomy today, but my flat is full of colour as I've been sorting out lots of rainbows of felt squares...


Want a giant rainbow of your own? They're available HERE.

As well as taking slightly blurry snaps of delicious felt rainbows, I've been taking a few new product pics as there's a brand new item over in the craft supplies section of my website:


Stork embroidery scissors! Hurrah!

Small embroidery scissors are super practical for snipping threads and cutting out small or intricate felt shapes... and the classic bird-shaped design is pretty darn cute.


P.S. rather excitingly, copies of my book Super-Cute Felt are now in stock on Amazon UK several weeks early (the first copies shipped last week!) If you're after a signed copy, please keep your eye on the blog as I'll be sure to announce when they're available in my shops :)