How To: Felt Owl

As promised, today I'm sharing a tutorial to make your own felt owl.

To make your owl, you will need:

- Assorted shades of felt in whatever colours you want. You'll need a larger amount of the main body colour and smaller pieces for the feathers and other details. You could make a "realistic" looking owl with lots of brown feathers, or use a selection of your favourite colours.

- Sewing thread to match the owl's pupils and beak. For sewing the rest of the owl you will either need one colour that you can use to sew all the pieces together or a selection of threads to match the felt you're using. I quite like how the contrast between the thread and felt colours adds extra decorative details to the owl, but you may prefer to make your stitching as invisible as possible. I chose lilac purple thread for the brown/pink owl pictured above, and turquoise for the blue owl shown below.

- Polyester stuffing
- Sewing needle, scissors, pins, and a pencil.
- The templates provided at the bottom of this post.

To make the owl:

1) Cut out all the pieces using the templates provided and your choice of felt colours. You need to cut out 2 x body, 2 x eyes, 2 x pupils, 1 x beak, 1 x left wing, 1 x right wing, and one of each feather piece (#1-5). (The foot template also shown on the pattern sheet is not required for this project).

2) Position the eyes, pupils and beak on one of the body shapes (make sure you leave enough room beneath them for the feathers!), then use matching thread to whip stitch the pupils and beak in place.

 3) Arrange the 5 feather pieces so they overlap as shown, starting with #1 at the bottom. Place the wing pieces in position over the top to check that the ends of the feather strips are hidden under the wings, then set the wings aside and pin the feathers in place.

4) Starting from the top of the feathers, stitch them in place with vertical stitches. Use small vertical stitches along the very top row, then long stitches in the centre of each feather shape, and finish by sewing a final row of vertical stitches along the bottom feather piece. Remove the pins as you sew.

5) Pin the two wing pieces in position. Sew a line of running stitch along the inside edge of each wing then remove the pins.

6) Finish the owl's face by whip stitching around each eye.

Your owl should now look like this:

7) Place the second body piece at the back of the one you've decorated, and pin them together. Sew around the edge with whip stitch, sewing the two layers together. Leave a gap along the bottom edge and remove the pins.

8) Stuff the owl with polyester stuffing, using a pencil to poke the stuffing into the top. Then sew up the gap with more whip stitches and finish your stitching neatly at the back.

This cute little guy would look really sweet propped up against your books (wise owls love books!). Alternatively you could fill him with lavender instead of polyester stuffing to make a cute lavender sachet, or add a loop of ribbon before you sew his front and back together and display him on the wall or hanging from a door handle.

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This tutorial is for non commercial use only: you can use it for as many owls as you like for yourself or as gifts for friends but please don't make any for sale. Please feel free to borrow 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!

Double click the template / click to open it in a new tab in order to view it full size and print:

Edit: if it's printed at 100% the owl body piece is 13cms - just over 5inches - high. You may need to click again on the template image to make it full size on your screen, then set it to print at 100%. If you're having trouble getting the image to print on one page, you may need to change the header/footer settings on your page setup and/or print the template a teeny bit smaller, e.g. 98% instead of 100%)